redeemed by these linked sentences

Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here, the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

~Mary Oliver (b. 1935), An Afternoon In The Stacks.

I love this poem so much. I said last year that Mary Oliver - more than any other poet, I think - writes poems that I want to live. Sometimes she even writes poems that I do live, although that is a little disingenuous, today. I did spend the entire day at the British Library, at a corner desk in the Rare Books Room, trying to turn myself into an historian of Early Modern Europe in twelve hours. (I am not as interdisciplinary as I would like to think, but dramaturgical skills, at least, serve me well.) But the British Library isn't the sort of library where you can roam the stacks at will and let the books fall into your hands, where you can duck into shadowy corners and get lost inside a story until somebody else's footsteps snap you out of your reverie, and you put the book back on the shelf, and move on. I miss that kind of library. I like this one, but it isn't quite the same.