Sitting Among the Stacks

Sitting Among the Stacks

(“Give advice to a wise person, and he will become even wiser. Teach a righteous person, and he will add to his learning.” Proverbs 9:9)

Do you have me where you want me?
Have I passed the inquisition?
Do my answers meet with your expectations?
Do I fit within the confines you’ve built for
membership in your organization?

Can I hedge my answers enough
to hide all the stuff you would suck out of
me
if you knew?
One day I’ll ask you the questions. One day
I’ll be bold enough to say
your black and white is dangerous
to me.
Your sentences are stunted; your growth is thwarted
by
minds made up a thousand years ago.

I remember so many hollow memories.
Did you put them there?

I swear you would never have approved me
lingering days at a time
between the booths and shelves that bound the
pages
of knowledge you never read for yourself.

I was once a baby and ate the pablum of the
generation before me.
I sucked at the teat. But the mother was a
monster, overgrown like the crossed-out answers
on a multiple-choice examination.

There is more in a single blade of grass than I
learned
in a lifetime of your doctrines, covenants,
catechisms, and fundamental truths.

It was not your fault. You did not know.
They hid the libraires far outside your view.
And, if serendipity dropped a new discovery in
your lap,
you were more afraid than I. You had so
much more to lose.

I was a square-headed cynic for a while,
a fuming boil of teakettle anger. That danger
is gone now.
Some plowed my back with iron teeth,
I plowed my own grieving desires.

But now, though my circle is smaller than a dime,
it gives me more room to peruse more rows of
slow inquiry. I will sit among the stacks and
take my time, the time that has been gifted to me.