South Stacks / by Brian Kunde

South Stacks
by Brian Kunde

Dust.
Old leather,
rotting quietly away
on the shelves.
Dewey call numbers,
painted on thickly
in an antique hand,
flaking away,
into obscurity.
A hint of movement.
A ghost-gleam
of mad eyes—
turn, and it's gone.

As you wander
the silent stacks,
the narrow aisles
—walls packed
with ill-fitting folios—
crowd you closely.
Low ceilings
threaten your head.
Metal floors, foil-thin,
register every footstep
in creaky complaint.
Sweating steam pipes
hiss—raw,
exposed, dangerous,
glorying in their
unwonted freedom
from encumbering walls.
Welcome
to the South Stacks.

Here you will find
no clean,
well-lighted place,
no user-friendly
info-mart.
All is different here.
Vanished rivers
carved these aisles,
leaving behind
a grand canyon;
a stratigraphic record
of old knowledge,
kept more
for history
than content.

This is not
the library you know.
This is a lost remnant
of the antediluvian archive
frequented by
extinct arthropods of the
Burgess Shale.
Dinosaurs lumbered
through these tomes.
Scattered here and there
might even be volumes
the Stanfords perused,
back in that
brief flicker
of pre-time
prior to
the Big Bang.

Later,
tectonic plates shifted,
raising and depositing
the micro-continent
of Meyer Library
over the
bibliographic beds.
The canyon-aisles
became caves,
dark, dank, dripping,
for adventurous
researchers
to explore
and spelunk,
pursuing the odd fact,
or virgin veins
of literature
eighty years
out of print.

Some never reemerge.
You've heard
the hushed rumors
of the lost—
the grey-haired recluses,
scrawny, ragged, feral—
eyes aflame
with the madness
of decayed, eccentric
knowledge,
barricaded behind
rickety carrels
in the far corners
of the caverns.

There, in their recesses,
fortified within walls
of fossilized journals,
they hoard their
crumbling quartos,
uncataloged,
rarer than scrolls
from Alexandria,
pre-dating the
discarded card files,
and glitzy databases.

Listen!
If you strain,
very closely,
you might hear echoes
of crazed laughter
over the hiss
of the steam pipes.
Beware!
Don't let them catch you!
Though hunger
for learning
stranded them here,
they must also eat!
Tread softly—
step cautiously.
Find your book. Go.

Flee back to your safe
techno-wonderland,
your interactive CD-ROMs,
your fragile, ethereal Net.
The volumes here,
young when
your fathers' fathers
were old,
read your frivolity.
They weigh you,
find you wanting.
Your kind is not safe
in this place.

Go, before their leaves
begin to rustle,
whispering
to the recluses
of your presence,
drawing
the wizened madmen
about you
like crows to carrion,
to rend the shallow defiler
limb from bloody limb
as they cackle in glee.

This is scholarship's
last redoubt.
Dilettantes
are not safe here.
Not here.
Not
in the South Stacks.

* * * * *

South Stacks (B-0098 [B-50])
( Poems from the Stanford Libraries: 9)

from A Dancing Floor for Butterflies : poems, 1st ed., Dec. 1999.
An earlier version appeared in
SUL News Notes, Vol. 5, no. 15, Apr. 19, 1996.

1st web edition posted 2/11/2000.