Question For A Window Gazer Poem by Denis Mair

In the barbershop I often walked past
I used to see fantasy books through the window
Sword-bearing elves and chimerical beasts on the covers
GAME OF THRONES, LAST UNICORN and ELF QUEEN OF SHANNARA
They were tossed onto the barber's personal shelf
Next to a row of hair-cream bottles
Every month a different grouping of titles
I sometimes saw the barber between haircuts
Reading in one of his customer chairs
I have been in and out of town so often
I can't pin down when the difference happened
No more change in that grouping of books
Four or five leaning, two of them flat
Picture of a colorful castle, fading in the sun
Always at that same left-behind angle
The barber on slow afternoons, sitting in his chair
No reading matter in his hands
It's been at least two years now
It must have been sometime after September 11th
When some equally wrenching impact
In the sphere of his personal life
Must have cut the threads to his fond imaginings
Put an end to his fantasy-reading hobby
I have no interest in his cloud-capped towers
It's something I passed on the way to a coffee shop
But I wonder—what made him stop?
And last week, the second week of September
My roving eye registered a new question mark
In the window, next to that old group of books
For the first time, a cover in black and white
A news photo of people gesturing tensely