In the Library After Hours

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have been withdrawn in countless years,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.