She Collected Dictionaries
She Collected Dictionaries
as other women take up men
and shelve them:
manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself
German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh,
like a passion for clothes that would hang
unworn in the dark,
for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls
in a shut case, nouns declined.
Each unknown word shone with delicious fire
and the alien phrases silked her skin
with their genders and connotations.
She might have been the end house
on the waterfront of Macau
welcoming every sailor in.
But the longing for many tongues
to part her lips – si, igen, ja,
ah oui, yes, yes –
was departure’s smile,
a leaning to the wind
that sweeps a glitter of light
across the sea and sets a silvery chill
at the neck. Quick, to those books
guarding the mantelpiece,
ISBNs snug as a span of days;
to bread and fruit and sparkling wine.
She had been given a cyclamen with scent,
some new trick that married violet and rose,
as if a flower should yearn to sing
and the pink timbre tremble
into quietest words.
She touched her flesh and knew
that it would fade as speech did
and did not.
And yet it was not language that she sought,
nor the music of any meaning.
An old allegiance drew her on
beyond the first ground of thought
and the idea even of silence
to the fifth season which must at last return
with its weather of recognition
and its lost ends.
from Jan Owen, "The Return"
In the Reading Room
By David Ferry
Alone in the library room, even when others
Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves:
There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room
Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables,
Looking as if they're reading, looking as if
They're studying the text, and understanding,
Shedding light on what the words are saying;
But under their steady imbecile gaze the page
Is blank, patiently waiting not to be blank.
The page is blank until the mind that reads
Crosses the black river, seeking the Queen
Of the Underworld, Persephone, where she sits
By the side of the one who brought her there from Enna,
Hades the mute, the deaf, king of the dead letter;
She is clothed in the beautiful garment of our thousand
Misunderstandings of the sacred text.
reading
By joanne burns
there were so many books. she had
to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive
implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes
inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of
her various rooms. when she changed houses she would pack some of the
books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been
hibernating. these resurrected books were precious to her for a while.
they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms. and thus she
would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance.
gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their
insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough. sometimes
she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the
books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite
possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept.
if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would
occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she
carried ‘the poetics of space’ round india for three months and it
returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey.
every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the
titles of its chapters to make sure it was there. and real. chapters
called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures
and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her
bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn. she now kept this
book in the darkness of her reference shelf. and she knew that one day
she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had
need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this
was the book she was going to read
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
By John Keats
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
