Swimming in the Stacks

            Is there any place in the world more wonderful than a library…I’m back in my high school library where I could pull up a chair between the shelves, prop my feet up on the chuffing clanking radiator and read.  Read anything:  poetry, essays, and novels.  I could backstroke my way through the deep pool of characters in Dickens –little misshapen figures darting in and out of low doors off the docks in London– Jenny Wren her fingers raw from sewing and rowing into the mist.  Noddy Boffin leans into the circle as Silas Wegg spins tales of treasures waiting to be found; stories about famous misers agitate his body so deeply his wooden leg from time to time, flies upwards. Little Kate Greenaway girls their curly locks falling on their shoulders as they eat porridge are suddenly grown into mob-capped women tattling on one another. The images of slag heaps, dust bins, moist cobbled streets lure me into the binding, the page its weight, color and texture invites my fingers to linger.

            Suddenly I am turning down a street, past an inn and then into a pub.  Let’s call it the Fox and the Hounds, a black sign with engraved gold lettering swings in the cold mist.  Enter the main room blazing with a coal fire and pull up a chair, one with brass tacks down the arm, the weight of someone else still holding warmth.  It’s not exactly raining outside; it’s misting like the vegetable section of the grocery store.  I remove my damp coat and hang it on that brass hook by the door.  There’s an oak table an arm’s length away; someone’s just lunched; bubbles of ale still cling to the thick glass.   I order a ploughman’s special:  cheese and relish, thick hefty bread with a crunchy crust.  Then consider brews of my favorite color:  honey pale, dark, the color of prune juice or dark like the ocean at night.  The smell of bee’s wax wafts up joining the vapors of beer and cigarettes. Signs of equitation glint in the light:  shiny stirrups, brass bits, chains, horseshoes.  A bell hangs on the barkeeper’s post; it’s almost time to sound the ll:00 closing chimes. “It’s time” T.S. Eliot wrote in the Wasteland. Ezra in his cloak sits behind his student.  With a soft red marking pen, he crosses out line after line until the poem is seamless, now ready to float out to sea from a Venetian wharf –off to Byzantium, off to America.  Off.

            Inside this cozy muffled space, inside this library, inside this room as close as bound leather, authors are murmuring to themselves and whispering to one another.  Henry James sits in the corner observing as always, the figures in the carpet—a story evoked by one small gesture of a frozen moment, say a couple who share a glance, a sure sign they are connected maybe by an object, say a golden bowl, or a ring worn only when they are together in the back room where they can continue unobserved.

            A latch lifts in the theater of my mind; I enter a beckoning walled garden where high tea has begun:  strawberries in silver bowls dolloped with clotted cream.  It is a Jane Austen moment. Words glide through my book like carp in a pool; and then they disappear as I turn a page.  Under the pale sun, I want to close a book in on myself and stay here protected by green hedges.  But, just as I settle in, there’s a tap on my shoulder and the ghostly librarian whispers it is time to go.  A pendulum dusts the air and disrupts time. The library, with its soft glow, is closed for the night.  The books are pushed back into straight lines, a regiment of leather.  They consider you; you consider them.  Their spines are as straight as the Royal Guard at Buckingham Palace.  It is time; and tomorrow there is always time.  

 Photo by Alan Goodin

    Biography - Alice Owens Johnson lives and writes in Black Mountain, N.C.  She and her husband winter in Oaxaca each year.  Alice recently won the first prize in the short story competition in the Crucible Literary Magazine. She has appeared recently in two anthologies:  I Thought My Father Was God, edited by Paul Auster and Alice Redux, stories about Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland.   Her writing has appeared locally; one piece was chosen to be read over National Public Radio.  Alice is completing a novel entitled Ash Wednesday, set in her home town, New Orleans.