Arabella's secret

Even librarians put books back in the wrong place.
A pause checking spines for codes, no more search
in the seat of an old pair of jeans, a good desk chair,
a bottle stretched too deep for finding open books birds
on tables, and wings flapping in the moonlight.

In spring, librarians become cowgirls and boys around dusk,
clocking off in a room with high ceilings; it is a Plaza, a dusty jangle
wind-chime of spurs. There’s heat, desert sand, and cobwebs
blowing across balconies in a sleight of hand, a vaporiser,
an electronic cigarette glows after closing time,

and she, who knows the time by the clock of birds,
is always too late at least twice a day. Once or twice
to get the geese on film, twice to reach the library
an hour before it closes and all her words run out.

She was tired of his foul mouth, the bottle, his secrets,
painting her a river washerwoman,
hammering his dusty clothes on the rocks,

when at the library, she’d take them off, if only
she’d catch the bottle more than half full,
not empty; may be it was not too late in the day
to vaporise the oblivion of a second with a kiss,
the rush of blood red words to the head, in the reading room,
where hush was a lover, being held cover to cover ’til closing time.