Dedication for the Librarian who Named Names

•

The library is dark now. The doors are closed against the wind. The windows are closed against the wind. The marble counter glows like strontium 40 and the librarian spends forty years waiting for it to make him blind, for his hair to recede like steam. The books swell like a hive in the darkness. Inside each, a wasp moves. Its legs trail like barbs, and its tongue, fine as glass, smoothes each page after use, adding to its white diary

another glistening sting like the aftertouch of a hand shake, like the touch after a promise broken.

The librarian tells them: He dried his scarf on the radiator, he asked for Marx and Weber, he sat quietly, taking notes on a yellow legal pad, he smiled at the young woman who read to children. The librarian wants to omit the last part: his scarf steaming as he folded it around his neck, how the moisture clouded his glasses as he drove home on a

route that he could drive blindfolded, as he drove home in a neighborhood he lived for thirty years, as he seemed just like any other slightly unhappy slightly handsome middle-aged man. The librarian worries that this might complicate things, but they take that in too, they write it down, they tell him that this too, is useful, and as they leave, they thank him.