That’s Mrs. Willoughby, the blue-haired lady
who adores this shift.
She moves among a hundred thousand books
she never reads. Her job’s
to whisk the many-colored spines.
When doors are locked, you hear her talking
loudly to the authors. Why, she wonders,
did they choose to spend their lives like this?
She knows that few of them
have been withdrawn in countless years,
and most will languish in the bookish dark
of decades, crumble into fly-dust,
molder into pulp. It’s just
the physics of the thing, of course.
Some reply to her in whispers,
swear they don’t mind isolation.
Few of them would take back what they gave
(or tried to give) to eyes and ears:
so many pages covered with their love
and fury, which the world ignored. It was quite
all right, it was, they tell her,
as her duster tickles their dry spines.
She nods. Sometimes she laughs at their
pretention and the waste of trees.