Two Drafts on the Library

Here are two things I've written recently with a shared theme (working in the library). I think being on break, and therefore distant, from this consistent and important piece of my life has made me want to put some words down about it.

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I sit behind the library’s service desk in Circulation, the most visible of its stratified segments. The desk is a rectangle of marble and wood that encloses us alongside shelves of returned books and items needing repair, textbooks, electronics for loan, and other materials tucked in drawers or hanging on hooks. The working area is a strip of floor space just behind the three Circulation desktops that snakes toward my right where a similar setup exists for the Reference department. Then, the zone banks 90 degrees and extends to the back wall of the enclosure, forming the Tech desk. In the early morning, the front of the library is quiet. A student or a pair of students will pad in without looking our way, carrying with them a slight swish of fabric or the jangle of a metal zipper.


When I started last spring my 8 A.M. Friday shift was marked by this breezy feeling, the sense that I was waking up to the heartbeat of my university. I sipped bitterly dark coffee that my supervisor brewed while twisting around in my chair. Wintry sun blazed prettily through the picture windows at the far side of the main floor, spotlighting a segment of he shuffling blue mountain range just beyond the parking lot. I was friendly with my coworkers, but we minded ourselves and sat peaceably in the morning silence.


Now there's movement everywhere, all the time. Under the eye and request of a seated authority, usually plucked from another library department, I rush to the ground floor to sort and push books into place for a couple of hours, first thing. If I’m at the desk at all, it isn't until prime time, 10 or 11 in the morning, when people stream in hurriedly. I fetch a General Biology textbook, the edition with stock images of butterflies on its white cover rather than dogs. I tell a student who I half-recognize, “I’m sorry, we’re all out of study rooms at the moment,” after glancing at an empty wall where keys typically dangle from red keychains. I direct people to the bathroom, which is in the direction they came from. Heads jerk up from note-taking and typing as I stroll around the main floor for a count. We take these every two hours. Downstairs I am too obvious, speed-walking the perimeter of the nearly empty stacks, counting the studious few by the windows.

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Library


Loose, leaving, you left a great woody stump


In squat remembrance of our sprawl at its height


Like two halves of an uncut block just before some axe


Cleft it to parts, that once was but one.


My business is paper. Sheathed in itself


Or cradled in laminate, inky and smooth.


So much goes unread and unseen in the depths


Of the library, where we are storying truth.


For your reference a ghost-tree is just past the desk;


The browse welcomes eyes-- the brush wants your touch--


The humus is loving-- the animate sleep.


Each book a marker I keep.