fourteen.

Seventeen that spring,
burying myself in the basement stacks of
the downtown library, spending my
evenings and weekends shelving
magazines with flaking edges and books
with gilt lettering, collections stamped
with the dates of stories long dead.

I curled into a chair, surrounded by steel,
waiting for the dumbwaiter to ring,
dragged the handle upward and reached into
the cool dimness for slips of paper
requests in careful printing. Life,
Time, Good Housekeeping,
all the virtues and vices.

Somewhere in April, a volume fell open.
September, 1911. "When a factory building
is not a factory building, it can, manifestly,
make no great difference
what you put into it."
Tonight, I find it again
and download a copy to my computer.

Thirty seconds,
instead of the hours of copying,
skimming every index, digging out
references to a tragedy no one
remembered. I came home most nights
with pieces of the past stuck in my hair,
coughing fitfully and newsprint smudged on my face.
Learning. Nothing important
is ever on the first page. Or the second.
That lists tell stories. That the
boundaries between now—this
place, this person I was not yet become—and
then are very thin indeed. No more than
the thickness of a page, a line of text.