Sounds of Evening Filter Into a Popular Bookstore

The business section stretches down the center, lined with brilliantly jacketed advice about success and the strategies thereof. It merges into the techniques of romance, and of divorce, and of planting strawberries in the yard for profit and dessert. A guard stands politely by the door. Outside the rain increases. A dove pads disconsolately on the sidewalk; an empty livestock truck rumbles by. A girl looks in the window a moment, her mouth more gentle than twelve angels. She sees an old man reading in the corner, his book of poems open like cygnet's wings.