Poetry for April 19

National Poetry Month

National Library Week

Poem for April 19, 2007

Dressmaker
by Éireann Lorsung

Nothing touches like tan velvet touches

the palm. Now the cracks come, because what gives

without taking?—Doesn't exist. Say

you forget what is lanolin, what is raw about fleece

uncarded & unwashed. Say the silver feel

of charmeuse lines your sleep. You've lost

what there was before pins & needles, sound

a scissors makes through cloth on a hardwood floor,

thick waist of the dressmaker's dummy. Don't tell me

any more. Without Burano lace, without cinnabar

strung on a cuff, shantung and satin and netting and swiss:

no rich man, no camel, no needle's threatening eye.

Willits Library National Poetry Month AND National Library Week Poem for April 19

Albert Goldbarth

from Library

This book saved my life…

This is the first book in the world….

This book provided a vow I took….

This is the book I pretended to read one day in the Perry-Castaneda Library browsing

room, but really I was rapt in covert appreciation of someone in a slinky skirt that

clung like kitchen plasticwrap. She squiggled near, and pointed to the book. “It’s upside-down,” she said.

For the rest of the afternoon I was so flustered, that when I finally left the library this is

the book, with its strip of magnetic-code tape, that I absentmindedly walked with

through the security arch on the first day of its installation, becoming the first (though unintentional) lightfingered lifter of books to trigger the Perry-Castaneda alarm, which hadn’t been fine-tuned as yet, and sounded even louder than the sirens I remember from grade school air raid drills, when the principal had us duck beneath our desks and cover our heads – as if gabled – with a book…

This book is inside a computer now…

This book existed in a dream of mine, and only there….

My niece wrote this book in crayon and glitter….

This book, 1,000 Wild Nights, is actually wired to give an electr/YOWCH!

This book I stole from Cornell University’s Olin Library in the spring of 1976.

Presumably, it still longs for its Dewey’d place in the dim-lit stacks….

This book caused a howl/ a stir/ a ruckus/ an uproar.

This book is the Key to the Mysteries….

This Bible is in Swahili.

This book contains seemingly endless pages of calculus – it may as well be in Swahili….

This book doesn’t do anyth / oh wow, check THIS out!

This book, from when I was five, its fuzzy ducklings, and my mother’s voice in the living

room of the second-story apartment over the butcher shop on Division Street. I’m fifty now. I’ve sought out, and I own now, one near-mint and two loose, yellowing copies that mean to me as much as the decorated gold masks and the torsos of marble meant to the excavators of Troy.

I open this book and smoke pours out, I open this book and a bad sleet slices my face, I

open this book: brass knuckles, I open this book: the spiky scent of curry,…I open this book: the wingbeat of a seraph, I open this book: the edgy cat-pain wailing of the damned thrusts up in a column as sturdy around as a giant redwood, I open this book: the travel of light, I open this book and it’s as damp as a wound, I open this book and I fall inside it farther than any physics, stickier than the jelly we scrape from cracked bones, cleaner than what we tell our children in the dark when they’re afraid to close their eyes at night.

And this book can’t be written yet: its author isn’t born yet.

This book is going to save the world.