Late May, and my wife and I are staying in a run-down hotel with large windows that overlook the ocean. The sun has just set. There’s no one at the beach, we’re so far north in the country that it’s still cold. Only one restaurant on the street below has a glowing paper lantern. We’ll go there later to eat milky raw squid and smoke cigarettes with the owner. But for now, we’re sitting at the utility table by the window in our room. I read her something from the book of Su Dongpo poems I brought from home. “Wanderings of a lifetime—what do they resemble? … Do you recall that day, steep winding slopes, road long, all of us tired, our lame donkeys braying?” A small note from the poet says his group rode donkeys because their horses had already died. The you in the poem was so strong when I read it, it might as well have been my horse he was talking about. In the morning, I read more poems out loud as my wife does her makeup and drinks a can of coffee I bought for her from the vending machine in the lobby. Sometimes, I think about Su Dongpo poems in the days ahead, certain lines coming to mind as we walk through parks with trees too young to bloom, watch robed jellyfish drift through aquarium tanks, or order more drinks from bars that play good rock records.

Back at home in the desert, I read more Tang and Song dynasty poets. There’s not much to do during the summer but laze around and save money. When I finish the books I already have on my shelf, I order more from ThriftyBooks.com and hide the packages under my shirt when I bring in the mail. I start recognizing the names of minor poets. I go to Book Gallery on payday, the used bookstore with high ceilings and dark wooden display cases that hold rare Audubon editions, oil paintings of the West, and fragile photographs of the Apache. They have an entire section dedicated to Chinese and Japanese poetry where I buy alternative translations and other curiosities. One Sunday afternoon, I pick up an anthology I’ve had my eye on. The makings of a monsoon have rolled in while I’ve been browsing. The sky is dark and tan from the dust that flicks against the windows with frantic pops. I stand by the doors with the owner, a one-eyed man who uses a magnifying glass to read his penciled price marks, as we watch the debris blow over the parking lot and the first black drops of rain appear on the pavement. Are you from Arizona? I ask him. Florida, he says. He’s used to more rain than this, but he’s grateful for any he can get, humidity be damned. In the end, a full rain never comes.

By the end of August, books are stacked on the edges of my desk and on the floor. The borders of my reading list now fuzzy enough to include haiku and the Psalms. I have a compulsion, but I now enjoy the rotten pomegranates that decorate my neighbor’s front lawn at the end of season, the shadows of cactuses that loom across my living room in the evening sun, and the clouds that cover the mountains on rare low temperature days more than I did before reading so many poems.

This auctioneer’s catalog is arranged chronologically with some exceptions.