The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker Page A

introduction, and if I finish the introduction I think I could call Roz with genuine confidence in my voice and tell her that yes, I'd been too much of a wallower in self-doubt but that things were on the mend and I wanted her to come back. I'm about one-seventh done with cleaning the office. Still quite a ways to go. One corner of the room is starting to get that spare, empty look. I do love that spare look.
    One of the piles I packed away was a small heap of reviews of my third book of poems, Worn. Not many of them. It wasn't a good book. Too political in an easy-breezy sort of way. A copy of Rain Taxi had a thoughtful reaction to it by Renee Parker Task. Charles Simic mentioned the book in one of his omnibus pieces in The New York Review of Books. It was just after Worn came out that I read Amy Lowell's book Six French Poets. In it Lowell observes that Henri de Regnier had just passed his fifty-first birthday. And she says: "Poetry seems to be, for some strange reason, a young man's job." This slapped me in the head like a big heavy cold dogfish. Poetry is a young man's job. What a frighteningly true thought. Poetry is like math or chess or music--it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kinds of brains don't last. Sometimes if you can hold on into old age you can have another late flowering, like Yeats--much of adult-hood crumbles and falls away, and you're left with highly saturated early memories and a renewed urge for rhyme. But that happens rarely.
    Also as I was cleaning I came across a small paper bag with several strands of raw beads in it. I'd bought them for Roz in a store on Second Avenue in New York. Roz strings beads, she's very good at it, very quick--she can watch a Chinese movie with subtitles and string beads at the same time, which is very impressive--and as I was walking toward Penn Station I found that I was passing through some kind of wholesale bead-supply neighborhood, with store after store selling raw beads. In each store the strands hung on hooks, arranged by color, strung on fishing lines, and when you went in you felt as if you were in some strange sort of crystallography experiment. I bought some pale gray green-veined beads and some smoky deep-red ones that I thought she would like--they weren't horribly expensive--and I hid them in my office for her birthday and now here they were. And it wasn't as if I could call her up and say, Roz, I found a bag holding several strings of raw beads from New York that I was going to give you and would you like to come on back and live here again and string them expertly the way you do while we watch movies together? Because she'd moved out. It was not a nice or welcome development for me for her to move out, it hurt me badly, I'm tottering, but I suppose I deserved it. And now what?
    I T'S TIME FOR BED . And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it's very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, you've taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.
    Of course it was better when I had Roz in the bed with me. But I don't have her now. Her warm soft self was extremely comforting, and it's not there. I could cup her upward hip or one of her dozing boobies with my hand. Good times. That cupping is rhyme--the felt matching of two congruent shapes. And now where she would sleep are these books, and they're lying there in leaning piles, and sometimes they slip off and nudge me in the eyebrow with one of their corners.
    Some of the books are thick, and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get roiled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it's like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It's a Campbell's Chunky