before we lose the words

One of my favorite things about National Poetry Month is the serendipity factor. I have a spreadsheet, and several different lists, and I save poems all year; there are certain, definite things I am going to post. But I also spend a lot of time waiting for the day to tell me what the poem should be, and I wander into libraries, and into bookstores, and browse the stacks, and sometimes—more often in April than any other time of the year—there is magic.

My mom got to San Francisco this evening, and came and picked me up from my first dinner with friends, and took me away to my second dinner, at a delicious vegetarian Indian restaurant in Berkeley. After dinner we drove around Berkeley and Oakland in search of a bookstore my mom thought she remembered, and eventually wound up on Piedmont, where we found both a book shop and a tea shop. The book shop was one of those magical used bookstores with endless interconnecting rooms and all the books you didn't know you were looking for. Mom found a book she desperately needed for a paper, and I, sitting on the ground in front of the bottom shelf of the poetry section, was suddenly confronted with a book by a former professor—her second book, in fact, which fell open to this poem. Obviously, I bought the book.

Williston Memorial Library,
Mount Holyoke College

The chapter ends. And when I look up
from a sunken pose in an easy chair
(half, or more than half, asleep?)
the height and heft of the room come back;
darkly, the pitched ceiling falls
forward like a book.
Even those mock-Tudor stripes
have come to seem like unread lines.
Oh, what I haven't read!

—and how the room, importunate
as a church, leans as if reading me:
the three high windows in the shape
of a bishop's cap, and twenty girls
jutting from the walls like gargoyles
or (more kindly) guardian angels
that peer over the shoulder, straight
into the heart. Wooden girls who exist
only above the waist—

whose wings fuse thickly into poles
behind them—they hold against their breasts,
alternately, books or scrolls
turned outward, as if they mean to ask:
Have you done your Rhetoric today?
Your passage of Scripture? Your Natural
Philosophy? In their arch, archaic
silence, one can't help but hear a
mandate from another era,

and all too easy to discount
for sounding quaint. Poor
Emily Dickinson, when she was here,
had to report on the progress of
her soul toward Christ. (She said: No hope.)
Just as well no one demands
to know that any more... Yet
one attends, as to a lecture,
to this stern-faced architecture—

Duty is Truth, Truth Duty—as one
doesn't to the whitewashed, low
ceilings of our own. Despite
the air these angels have of being
knowing (which mainly comes by virtue
of there being less to know back then),
there's modesty in how they flank
the room like twenty figureheads;
they won't, or can't, reveal who leads

the ship you need to board. Beneath
lamps dangled from the angels' hands—
stars to steer us who knows where—
thousands of periodicals
unfurl their thin, long-winded sails;
back there, in the unlovely stacks,
the books sleep cramped as sailors.
So little time to learn what's worth
our time! No one to climb that stair

and stop there, on the balcony
walled like a pulpit or a king's
outlook in a fairy tale,
to set three tasks, to pledge rewards.
Even the angels, after all,
whose burning lamps invoke a quest
further into the future, drive
us back to assimilate the past
before we lose the words.

No, nobody in the pulpit
but for the built-in, oaken face
of a timepiece that—I check my watch—
still works. As roundly useful as
the four-armed ceiling fans that keep
even the air in circulation,
it plays by turns with hope and doubt;
hard not to read here, in the clock's
crossed hands, the paradox

of Time that is forever running out.

—Mary Jo Salter (b. 1954, Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College 1984–2007), "Reading Room" from Unfinished Painting, 1989.