When You Buy My Books
 

You allow shampoo, toothpaste, potatoes—
home fries cooked up on my stove top
and potatoes reconfigured,
tater tots purchased with lunch money,
bobby pins for my daughter’s copper colored hair. 
She will lose them, you will buy them again,
as well as dental care and gum repair,
kale for green smoothies.

Local eggs from the egg lady,
who has a make-shift plastic coop.
Some evenings I drive by and see
fluffed silhouettes roosting, imagining I am a fox.
Perhaps one day you are an unknowing partner
in a brick and mortar hen house.

If you buy enough books,
you gift me a massage at an asian foot massage palace,
a large tip for the girl making minimum wage.
In each season, you bestow a bouquet of one flower—
purple iris, tulips, sunflowers, lily white narcissus.
In the fall, a pumpkin to sit on my stoop,
in winter, a rosemary tree to enhance my entry.

You purchase these at the farmer’s market
and place a dollar in the hat of a street poet.
You help me say yes to Doctors Without Borders,
yes to clothes made from bamboo that feel like silk
and silk, but still secondhand,
cello and saxophone lessons,
thermostat set at 68 instead of 67,
tuition for a kid who wants to build gardens.

On a Saturday night, 
you score me a Blue Moon beer and a five dollar cover,
bogeying with a band of musicians out of Wenatchee, 
you buy a song on their CD
and two ridges of their washboard.
You procure paper and a factory where paper is bound, 
you pony up for ink and cardboard boxes,
a truck and a truck driver’s wages.

Dear Patron, 
you join the ranks of all enablers—
midwives, money lenders, grant writers.
You are the Earthly Endower of the Arts,
with each purchase you provide more than you know.
More than any object or sundry sustenance,
you gift me honed, honeyed hours
to put into practice what I tell others
plumb the heart of the world,
share what you come up with.