Robert B. Shaw
ADVANCED RESEARCH
A buzzer sounds. And now a voice, too bored
to reach for pleas or threats, broadcasts the same
old bulletin: the library will close
in fifteen minutes. I can hear a quickened
pummel of footsteps through the thin, rattling
ceiling, and I wonder what it is
holding me back from joining in that ratlike
scurry of desertion. Even more
pointedly, I wonder why I'm here.
This is a level of the stacks I've never
up to now been lost in - so far down
below ground it's in fact a sub-sub-basement.
Stingy luminosity meted out
by jittery ceiling tubes about to fail
helps even less than usual to scan
the titles mouldering on their metal shelves.
Really, it's like a mineshaft; I cou ld use
one of those flashljght caps the miners wear,
I tell myself - when, sharply as a lightbu lb
switching itself on, it comes to me:
the quest is at an end. Here in this section,
if I can only find it, is the book
I've been tracking for years, beginning seven flights up,
the book that waits to tell me everything
I'll ever need to know. It's worse than hopeless
without a call number; I'm about
to give it up when suddenly my eye
fixes on a particular cobwebbed spine.
Unbelievable luck - can it be trusted?
I pull it from its shadowed perch and turn
a flaking leather cover back, and find -
dust. The pages all have pulverized
like some poor pharaoh's mummy stripped
of grave-linen in a rough hunt for gems;
now at my feet a little heap of chaff
