The Eagle Eye Book Shop

Lyrics

The air in here is made of paper and time.
A little dust from the high shelves.
A little weak coffee from the pot Cliff Stewart keeps by the register.
He opened the door in 1984.
Just a storefront between the kosher butcher and the bank.
He built the shelves himself, pine going gray.
He knew where every spine was, every forgotten history of DeKalb County, every poet who ever taught a semester at Emory.
The card catalog drawers are still there, holding pens and rubber bands.
A monument to a system that worked.
And on the local authors shelf, our own small voices, bound and stacked.
Holding their own against the noise from the parking lot.
The Eagle Eye sees the quiet stories.
The ones that don't need a billboard on North Druid Hills Road.
Just a good spine and a clean font.
I remember a Thursday evening, must have been 1997.
A kid reading poems from a chapbook printed on the back of old Kroger receipts.
We sat in the mismatched armchairs in the back room.
The words were about the creek behind his house, the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.
And for an hour, that was the most important thing in Atlanta.
Cliff just smiled and poured more coffee.
And on the local authors shelf, our own small voices, bound and stacked.
Holding their own against the noise from the parking lot.
The Eagle Eye sees the quiet stories.
The ones that don't need a billboard on North Druid Hills Road.
Just a good spine and a clean font.
The big boxes came. Borders, with its escalators. Barnes & Noble, with its cafe.
They built empires of discounted hardbacks.
And then they were gone.
But the bell on this door kept ringing.
Because a neighborhood isn't a market. It's a library of faces.
The sun goes down over the Toco Hill sign.
Headlights sweep across the front window.
I find a book, pay the man.
And the bell rings once more as I leave.