THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT

by Debra Allbery

In those days, when books had to be read by hand, 
had to be held and opened and pages turned, 
it was her job to repair them from being read 

too much: hairline tears on chipped pages 
lifting loose from their signatures, frayed bindings  
pulled away from cracked spines, pressed boards 

thumbed into little fans. In the library at night,  
she sat in a small room behind the dark stacks  
with glue and paste, waxed paper, rubber bands, 

a dim brass lamp illuminating her swift surgery. 
Someone’s cast-off—a halted war scene on its base,  
tarnished doughboy crouched in an imaginary clearing 

behind a tiny tangle of brass barbed wire. Past midnight, 
she carried the trussed books back to the shelf to cure  
with the bandaged others. Concordances, histories, 

codices. From caudex: the trunk of a tree. Then would unwrap 
a mended book and begin to read in the tight circle 
of lamplight, the scent of the stacks clean as split wood.

 

Debra Allbery is the author of Fimbul Winter, which won the Grub Street National Book Prize, and Walking Distance, which won the Starrett Prize. She joined the poetry faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 1995 and served as its director from 2009-2023. She lives near Asheville, NC.