Lady Librarian Invites Me to a Wedding

Isidoro M. Cruz

The Complete Works of Shakespeare,
a couple of pages from Romeo and Juliet missing.
A dog-eared Introduction to Veterinary Medicine.
An Unabridged Dictionary of Civil Engineering
bored by silverfish holed up in its spine.

Along with tattered and obsolete volumes,
books no one has ever borrowed
lie on library tables days before the book fair;
the head librarian has invited me, the literature chair,
to handpick the ones to be deselected.

“Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds
Admit...” The rest of the line is unreadable.
The prosody of the verse, I notice, is not iambic.
I know the sonnet ends in a couplet.
I know a line somewhere has a feminine ending.

Some say Ms. Librarian lives alone
in an apartment near the river
because she has a fear of fire.
I look at her and remember
not to judge a book by its cover.

Word has it that at home she has her own
library, with a well-ordered card catalog she updates
every year, and that her towels and all things else
are color-coded, a color for each day of the week.
The color for Monday is blue.

Several books smell of must
but she looks forlorn about having to bid them
goodbye. But they have to go, she says.
She is retiring early, she says.
I fumble for a reply and make up a book request.

“Do you have a new version of Shakespeare’s tragedies?”
I ask. She hands me a call number.