LIBRARY
DAYS
I
would sit for hours with the sunlight
streaming
in the high windows and know
the
delivery van was safe, locked in the yard
with
the brewery trucks, and my job secure.
I
chose first a virgin copy of The Idiot
by
Dostoevsky, every page of which confirmed
life
was irrational. The librarian, a woman
gone
gray though young, sat by the phone
that
never rang, assembling the frown
reserved
exclusively for me when I entered
at
10 A.M. to stay until the light dwindled
into
afternoon. No doubt her job was to guard
these
treasures, for Melville was here, Balzac,
Walt
Whitman, my old hero, in multiple copies
each
with the aura of used tea bags. In late August
of
1951 a suited gentleman reader creaked
across
the polished oaken floor to request
the
newest copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships
only
to be told, “This, sir, is literature!”
in a
voice of pure malice. I looked up
from
the text swimming before me in hopes
of
exchanging a first smile; she’d gone back
to
her patient vigil over the dead black phone.
Outside
I could almost hear the world, trucks
maneuvering
the loading docks or clogging
the avenues
and grassy boulevards of Detroit.
Other
men, my former schoolmates, were off
on a
distant continent in full retreat, their commands
and groans
barely a whisper across the vastness
of
an ocean and a mountain range. In the garden
I’d
planted years before behind the old house
I’d
long ago deserted, the long winter was over;
the
roses exploded into smog, the African vine
stolen
from the zoo strangled the tiny violets
I’d
nursed each spring, the mock orange snowed
down
and bore nothing, its heavy odor sham.
“Not
for heaven or earth would I trade my soul,
rather
would I lie down to sleep among the dead,”
Prince
Myshkin mumbled on page 437,
a pure
broth of madness, perhaps my part,
the
sole oracular part in the final act
of
the worst play ever written. I
knew then
that
soon I would rise up and leave the book
to go
back to the great black van waiting
patiently
for its load of beer kegs, sea trunks
and
leather suitcases bound for the voyages
I’d
never take, but first there was War and
Peace,
there
were Cossacks riding their ponies
toward
a horizon of pure blood, there was Anna,
her
loves and her deaths, there was Turgenev
with
his impossible, histrionic squabbles,
Chekhov
coughing into his final tales. The trunks—
with
their childish stickers—could wait, the beer
could
sit for ages in the boiling van slowly
morphing
into shampoo. In the offices and shops,
out
on the streets, men and women could curse
the vicious
air, they could buy and sell
each
other, they could beg for a cup of soup,
a
sandwich and tea, some few could face life
with
or without beer, they could embrace or die,
it
mattered not at all to me, I had work to do.
