m y s e l f a book its secrets, trapdoors: words, the pictures with the moving eyes each sliding recess in the tongued constructions of its pages bound in marbled covers scuffd & veined its faces, volumes shelves of symbol paradox, complaint: the meaningless lent out as freely as the meaningful the sheaves of ribald songs as freely as the lives of saints its features, fractal images in wood-pulp & in dye the panelled walls the doors of ivory the spiral staircases the ladders on their wheels & rails the indexes the catalogues the archives & the record-books births marriages & deaths the great year's texts their mathematics & their grand geometries their botany their wild zoologies: this library its halls & garrets, miles & forests reams unspoilt & rotten everything: the whole to you till language is forgotten