South Stacks: A Poem / by Brian Kunde

South Stacks: A Poem
by Brian Kunde

Dust.
Old leather,
rotting quietly away
on the shelves.
Dewey call numbers,
painted on in an antique hand,
flaking away, into obscurity.
Narrow, cramped aisles.
Ceilings close to your head.
Metal floors, foil-thin,
registering every footstep
in creaky complaint.
Steam pipes confront you,
raw, exposed and dangerous,
glorying in their unwonted freedom
from encumbering walls.
Welcome to the South Stacks.

Things are different here.
This is a lost remnant
of the antediluvian library
frequented by the arthropods
of the Burgess Shale.
Dinosaurs read these tomes.
Scattered here and there
there are even volumes
the Stanfords may have perused,
back in that brief flicker of pre-time
before the Big Bang.
Ancient rivers carved these aisles,
leaving behind a grand canyon;
a stratigraphic record
of superseded knowledge,
kept more for history
than for content.

Later, tectonic plates shifted,
depositing the micro-continent of Meyer
over the bibliographic beds.
The canyons became caves,
dark, dank, and dripping,
for adventurous researchers
in pursuit of odd facts,
or virgin veins of literature
eighty years out of print,
to explore and spelunk.
Some never find their way out.
Rumors abound of grey-haired recluses,
scrawny, ragged and feral,
their eyes aflame with the madness
of decayed, eccentric knowledge,
barricaded behind rickety carrels
in the far corners of the caves.
There, in their recesses,
they wait for the unwary,
fortified within walls
of fossilized journals,
hoarding crumbling folios
older than your databases;
pre-dating the discarded card files;
uncataloged, and rarer
than scrolls from Alexandria.
If you listen very closely,
you can almost make out
the echoes of their crazed laughter
over the hiss of the steam pipes.
Beware! Don't let them catch you!
Though their thirst for learning
stranded them in this place,
they must also eat!

Tread cautiously.
Find your book and go.
Flee back to the safety
of your slick, add-filled magazines;
your fragile, ethereal Net;
your interactive CD-ROMs.
The volumes here are ancient:
they read your shallowness,
and they resent it.
Go, or soon they will whisper
to the recluses of your whereabouts,
and then the wizened madmen
shall all converge upon you
like crows upon carrion,
to rend the defiler
limb from bloody limb
as they cackle in glee.

Dilettantes are not wanted here.
This is the last redoubt of scholarship.
These are the South Stacks.

* * * * *

South Stacks: A Poem

Originally published in
SUL News Notes, Vol. 5, no. 15, Apr. 19, 1996.

1st web edition posted 7/29/2008.
This page last updated 8/2/2013.