What do you need? the Quiet Man asked
when I knocked again at his door.

What do you want?
He was closing up.

I don’t know, I said.
Woolf, Anbesol, Baldwin, Keats,

I’ll take anything.
I knew sometimes he slept right there in his shop,

with blankets on the bottom shelf,
history above, Bulletin

of the Atomic Scientists to the left.
Papers littered his desk

and the floor where we lay our heads,
letting the pure products of the shapely mind

inform the equally combustible body.
Who is it who says the closer you are

to an irreversible apocalypse the more fragile
language is?

We slid the dictionaries from the shelves
and opened them to apocalypse,

the word on everyone’s lips.
O lips!—

As if we could ever bid these joys farewell.