Anything

Anything.

That is what I would do for you--
anything.

Write my name....here.
Put it on pastels, the little squares I keep just for these occasions.
My heart, and the ornate clock on the face of the observation level
are in harmony--

tick...oh.....tick....ohhh.

Anything.
That is what stirs me when I look at you
and your sweater rides up in a fold at your hip, soft as a cat.
How could I deny you
if you stand there and tease me, so deliberately, like that?

Here is the key.
The one I keep next to my heart, warm from the skin of my breast,
where the two freckles stay, inseparable, like us.
Here is the key.
The one for opening the carefully restricted,
faculty-only
strictly-by-appointment reading room with the soft lamps and the throws.

Anything.
Possessed by me, made accessible to you,
with fragrance of rosemary, pansies,
fennel, columbine, rue, daisies, and violets.
Find me, look for me
at the desk beneath the clock at two,
across from the locked doors,
I'll be waiting--wearing colors, not white, and my little slippers.

I have catalogued our love, collected our sweetest words.
Find me, curl your arms around my head, whisper to me and don't stop,
don't leave, just kiss my hair, trace the edge of my ear, and love me back
like Anything.
______

 for my own Fireblossom Friday challenge "Looking Beyond The Obvious."

The Big Book Of Russian Haiku

The Big Book Of Russian Haiku is missing from its shelf
in the Chrysanthemum Room of the Glorious Proletariats' Library.

Five librarians,
each of them an opium dream of precisely measured sensuality,
and all of them wearing dark-framed eyeglasses and 
spit-shined riding boots,

Persuade me to wait exactly seven minutes while they submit
my request to the appropriate bureaus.
There is a carp pond
and a jar of startlingly blue ink pens.

If they can locate The Big Book Of Russian Haiku for me,
I can hold it like a discus,
and break the jaw of my old professor with it;
he betrayed the revolution
by watching baseball and taking up Buddhism. 

My time in the Chrysanthemum Room is nearly done,
and I can hear ten unstoppable leather boots approaching down the hall.
They tell me the book is gone
lost to the Russian winter,
and besides, what use anyway, to have it?

Then they invite me to share their samovar,
samizdat, 
and sable fur they favor
for reading Pushkin by candlelight with library patrons
taken--one at a time--into their confidence.
________ 

For copyright reasons, I can't include the image that inspired me, but you can view it HERE.

 

Book Worm In Seal Skin

I'm a book worm in seal skin,
Gladys on the half shell,
exiting the surf wearing a long wool skirt,
a smart jacket,
librarian glasses,
and an antiquarian hat.

(I meant to trip in my high button shoes.
I meant to do that.)

So, now, come out from the stacks, you.
Bring me a rose
and state your business.

Yes, yes. I'm the most beautiful woman
that you've ever spotted behind a reference desk.
Your heart is mine,
to catalog and shelve,
and so forth and so on. I've heard it all before.

Do something different.
Throw your electronic gadgets in the trash.
Do an interpretive dance around the safety cones
which mark the wet spot on the floor.
Then,
lie down with me there,
play with my hair and read to me your own poem
about having to be lashed to the microfiche reader,
so that you won't throw your life away
for love of my song.

Wrap me in a net and slide the chopsticks from my head.
Check me out, Padawan.
Get lost in me, as in a book, or Old Briney.
If you whisper the correct call number, I will sigh
--in that way you just knew all librarians can sigh--
and stay seven years with you,
getting on top,
making spot-on recommendations,
and organizing your special collections like nobody ever has before.

Or, you can stand there gaping,
and I'll slide back into the surf as if I had never existed at all,
here and gone,
leaving just my hat ribbon floating in the foam.
_______ 

Happy Birthday, "99" !

As a little kid, I wanted to be Agent 99. I think I still do! Happy birthday to Barbara Feldon.

My Love, Alexandrian

My Love is as smooth as the most beautiful lie,
and as merciless, and raven-clawed, as absolute truth.

See the hunk of shit she drives,
and the impossible perfection of her elaborate expletives,
caressed like sleepy babies
on her lips until the language seems
almost holy.

She licks me with her tiger tongue,
wearing me away;
she planes me, layer by layer,
until I am nothing but shavings,
fragrant and useless and
utterly at the mercy of gravity, and her moods.

I am a single leaf of milled paper,
carried like a new future in a thylacine's mouth.
My Love, she is the burning library at Alexandria,
sending everything she can so magnificently be
directly Heavenward, but piecemeal,
as ashy birds,
word by
word by
gorgeous
word.
_____

the thylacine was a wolf-like marsupial which lived in great numbers in Australia and New Zealand, but which is now thought to have been hunted to extinction. The thylacine had the widest gape of any known mammal. 

The library at Alexandria was one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, a repository of the world's knowledge up to that time. It burned.
_____