My First Time in the Regenstein Stacks
05.12.03 - 8:36 p.m.
Wrote this awhile ago, upon first entering the book-section of our main campus library.
1.
Musky
smells like knowledge
and vein-hatched hands that danced
to distill what their world weary minds beheld.
It’s centuries percolated into history.
It’s humanity condensed and rehydrated and
eaten and vomited splattered onto
once white paper in steady black font.
2.
I clack-clack down a corridor of books books books
books books books books books books books.
Stunning books narrow to a V
as far as I can see.
Infinitely orderly.
Chaotically infinite.
Here, Giants are commonplace, tucked into
plastic cocoons and shelved, yellowing
Opuses untouched.
A thin sliver between two others.
But at least still existing.
A few spectators still trickle through this Giant tomb.
3.
I can see why you want to have sex here.
It’s sexy.
Not just the danger,
the cathedral-like sanctitude and silence,
not just the holiness praying for desecration.
Here dwells humanity’s greatest
Geniuses.
The foremost echelon, who were able to beat down
the poverty and gluttony, the agony and complacence,
the worst and best society has to offer.
Yet now, they’re eight-by-eleven-by-two,
but one volume among shelves
one shelf among rows
one row among floors
one building among thousands of millions,
all full of floors & rows & shelves & volumes.
This means that you’re minuscule.
Your own anonymity devours you.
You grapple. You resist.
You yearn to sink unthinkingly, into
your lover’s arms, sweaty & passionate & alive
with the physical reaffirmance of your own existence.
I love you, you whisper.
You exist, for the moment, at least.
4.
Clack clack clackity
My footsteps deafen
A commotion bouncing off sleeping giants,
the only source of verberation.
I can imagine moans of climax,
Throaty cries, amplified by the eons
of intellect and sensation.
They are no longer lonely, for the moment
but delving into
an orgasmic copulation of existence and remembrance |