Among them are volumes utterly bereft
of irony: a Lutheran hymnal, a collected

Shakespeare dollhouse thin. Perhaps
they were assembled for a child's room,

doled out to daughters solitary, formal,
or plucked at once—fleeting impulse—

from an antiquer's booth, the proprietor
barely willing to let them go.

However they congregated, they sit now
forgotten, lost behind glass, protective

of the oils that will destroy them:
last vestiges of a dozen generations of fingers.