Without Censure

6:00 a.m., three hours before opening. It’s quiet—

and dark. Philip Roth and Norman Mailer have stopped

quarrelling in their double-edged tongues about

misogyny and machismo, asleep in their corner of my

American lit aisle 846. Neither Hawthorne nor Melville

has awakened to discuss hints of homoeroticism

between Moby Dick’s Ishmael and Queequeg. Mark Twain

is smoking the first of his many pipes, imagining scenes

along the Mississippi muddied in social convention, rarely

black and white. Emily Dickinson and Rupi Kaur in adjoining

stacks murmur trochees about chiaroscuro, night succumbing to day.

Shakespeare, several time zones away in my aisle 832,

has been awake for hours, cutting quills, dipping ink,

honing iambic pentameters to best Christopher Marlowe

before the pub’s last call. They will pen murder and love

and lust and serendipity and fate, the despair and hope of humanity

caught between our winter tales and mid-summer dreams,

their prose pulsing. Across my library, Socrates ruminates

in aisle 183, Plato mumbles postulations in 184, while the

Subconscious envisions battling the Self in aisles 126 and 127,

Ego trying to rein in the fraying synapses of Id.

In between and ever on the edge, history (aisle 900) warns

about repeated pasts; science (aisle 600) invents the future.

The lights are off throughout the library’s first and

second floors, my stairs ascending like Beatrice, descending

like Dante. A glimmer of dawn is seeping through the skylights,

casting shadows on the books, painting the mahogany shelves

in the umber of café au lait, percolating to awaken ideas.

Our books smell of vanilla and mustiness, ink and paper, words

that slumber in psyches like seeds in fertile soil, philosophies that fire

in minds like Joan of Arc championing freedom on a pyre.

Every book’s spine is somewhat aligned. We try for order, but why?

My library houses dissent. Spinoza, always “a disturber of the peace”

in my aisle 190, has never been shelved properly. He juts and slants,

continually breaking with dogma. I’ll let him be. I’ll let them all be,

without censure. They have thoughts to think. When my library opens

at 9:00 a.m., light will shine; words will kindle into phosphorous

and rattle as sabers drawn, warring.