I was sitting on the sofa after dinner one night earlier this week, watching an episode of Modern Family, when my husband came in holding a stack of mail on top of a slightly cumbersome package.

“What’s this?” I asked as he handed the box to me. “I haven’t ordered anything recently.”

“It’s from Chris Bursk,” he said.

I frowned at the large shoebox wrapped in plastic in a well-that-can’t-be-right sort of way and then glanced at the return address and said, “Oh, no. It’s from his wife, actually.”

I wrestled the heavy plastic wrapping off the box and lifted the lid. Inside was a small stack of books with a note taped to the lid that read simply: “From Chris Bursk’s home library.” A small laminated card was paperclipped to the note: a memorial card for Chris from the funeral home. On one side were a few lines of one of his last poems, and on the other was a picture of him and his family.

I know it doesn’t sound like all that much, but I was still touched. I suspect that all the poets and writers that Chris taught and worked with will be receiving similar packages in the coming weeks. Chris’s library was extensive, and what better way to cull through it than this? Who among us wouldn’t treasure a piece of a library of an admired writer and friend?

I set the stack of books down next to me on the couch and examined the titles. Mostly they were volumes of poetry, plus a couple-few reference books (An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton, for example) and some other prose. But mostly it was poetry, because of course, what else would it be? Some of the writers’ names I recognized and some were unknown to me, but some of the titles were oddly and sadly serendipitous: Teahouse of the Almighty (Patricia Smith) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Definition of the Soul (John Skoyles). I didn’t want to think too much about it or read too much into it, but once again, just like that damn moth that flew into my garage this summer, it was just weird.

Don’t get me wrong. I highly doubt that Chris or his wife ever sat down and selected specific and intentional titles to send out to everyone prior to, and in the event of, his untimely death. In fact, I think it far more likely that his wife was simply picking books of off shelves in chunks, putting them into shoeboxes, and sending them out. (And just trying to get through it still in one piece.) But even in these random groupings, it’s like the universe has a way of resonating, a way of creating poetry out of a tiny piece of chaotic chance coming off of someone’s dusty bookshelves. And what is the universe, if not poetic?

All these thoughts were swirling around in my head as I opened up Definition of the Soul. All throughout the pages I found the endearingly familiar pencil scrawls and jottings and triple exclamation points of Chris marking lines and passages that appealed to him. In the table of contents, he had actually rewritten some lines of the poems in the book that struck him the most:

whether you’re happy or unhappy, it’s impossible to cross alone

and

begin to pronounce the words of this world in the language of the next

Again: such resonance.

He must have jotted these notes more than twenty years ago (the book’s copyright is 1998), but here I was reading them, stunned at how timely they remain, and by how much I could still learn from Chris, by the chance arrival of this small stack of books that came unexpectedly from his bookshelves to mine.

“This is amazing,” I said to my husband. “It’s like getting one last reading list from him. Or, if I were to find all the passages he marked, and use them as prompts, one last batch of writing assignments.”

“So,” my husband said, “he sent you one more workshop after all.”

I nodded, my lips pressed together, and managed not to start crying right then and there. The tears came later, while I was doing the dishes, letting the dog out, turning off lights, taking a new and treasured TBR pile upstairs to my study… you know… all those little things that make up the end of an average day, things that may or may not make it into a new poem because for some reason or other (it doesn’t matter why) they suddenly resonate, and we’re lucky enough to notice it, capture it, write it down.