Arcadian

Shops that only pop up in your dreams
are not unlike the ones you visit
awake, except that what you buy then
vanishes in the blink of an eye.

In my case, it’s never anything
practical but always some obscure
edition of verse or a record
salvaged from the Soviet archives

and much of the delight’s in finding
the shop itself, a shop that appears
to be managed by sleep, yet exists
along an everyday labyrinth

part-shopping mall, part-walk-in monkish
illumination. It feels somewhere
I’d like to be in the afterlife —
an old, darkly-panelled, cigarette-

haunted, quiet centre of browsing,
whose stairs twist out of sight above shelves
laden with poetry, some of which
I feel sure I must have bought before.