At the University Library
Jackson
First published in A coat of ashes (Recent Work Press 2019).
What will be lost
The curved white chairs at round white tables
The white benchtops whose ends bend around to be legs
The pillar labelled Information, ringed with screens
The ebooks and online journals
The paywalls
The woman who issues from a glass-walled room
Her bright blue lanyard, her freckled collarbone
The ancient lift that takes me to the stacks and back
The red scanline of the self-check machine
The clunk as it unlocks my book
The coffee dregs in a cardboard cup
The puzzle of which bin it goes in
The perspex security scanners
The golden loops inside them, their invisible intangible field
The doorway named after someone
The idea that everything that counts may be found here
What has been lost
The card catalogues in their dark wooden drawers
The brass frames around the drawer labels
The librarians behind their counters
The counters
The thick china rims of the cheap stackable mugs
The cafe ceiling with its dangling teabag tags
The idea that you might throw a teabag
The idea that your teabag might stick
The photocopier room
The change machine
The papery rustle of the Science Citation Index
The sense that, somehow, everything was here
What was lost
A wetland
A hunting ground
Many black swans
A thousand chanted centuries
An infinite number of spirits
A pattern of rainfall
The names of stars and stones
The knowledge that everything was here
Feature image by John R. Snow
