jock librarian

I missed an opportunity to nominate Julia Alvarez's collection of poems, The Woman I Kept to Myself, while serving on a book committee a few years ago. Sigh. At the time, I was transfixed with the novel, thirsting for stories and following with great interest: Nazneen's plight (in Monica Ali's Brick Lane), Dylan and Mingus's developing friendship (in Lethem's Fortress of Solitude), Amir's painful return to Kabul (in Hosseini's The Kite Runner). 2004 was the same year books by Edward Jones and Mark Haddon rocked the literary world and the sizzling story collections by ZZ Packer and Oscar Casares debuted.

But this evening, as I slowly weaved through a crowd of umbrellas, I spotted a young woman standing in front of the research library staring at one of the stone lions. And I was reminded of this haunting voice in Alvarez's "Lunch Hour, 1971."

It was the autumn of my discontent
in New York City. I was twenty-one
with nothing to show but a resume
of thin successes: sundry summer jobs,
a college-writing prize, four published poems
in a small journall edited by friends.
I got a job on 42nd Street
with Special Reports, Incorporated,
a series of newsletters that went out
to schools and libraries on hot topics.


I was put in charge of Special Reports:
Ecology and the new Women's Issues,
which I manned from the tiny broom closet
called my office, from which I could see--
once the leaves fell--two lions reclining
before the public library. That fall
our bestseller, Special Reports: The World,
was full of news about the Vietnam war.
The blood-red oak leaves falling in the park
outside my window seemed sad mementos
of mounting casualities a world away,
and closer in the choices I had made.
Each day at noon, I'd race down to the street,
past protestors handing out peace buttons
and stale leaflets I'd pretend to read.
I ate a quick snack sitting on the steps
between the lions, wiped my greasy hands
on their stony manes, and still hungry,
I spent my lunch hour in the library,
feeding the poet starving inside me.