This is where I met Babar and Gus and 
Charlotte who was friends with a pig 
and taught us both Life Goes On 
even through tears.
I watched my mom carry her weight in books
to the librarian-lady paid to look mean 
but she was actually nice as she took pictures
of punchcards and told me I would have 
such fun where I was going.

We were poor though I didn’t know it
as I poured over a Big Book of Ships
and I listened to Drums 
that I hated hated hated but 
I loved the way my grandma read so I 
pretended (I think she knew). 

Later I'd walk to that funky stoned (literally)
building on my own, corner of Vanowen and Vanalden.
There I solved cases with Encyclopedia Brown 
and found a book called The Battle of Midway 
that taught me sometimes a war comes down to 28.2072° N, 177.3735° W.  
Gray's Anatomy — wow! How did they draw that well, 
and is that what I look like inside? 
Where the Red Fern Grows because,
you know, dogs — and to make myself feel better 
I picked up The Red Pony.  Mistake. 
Except tears and truth often go together.

Steinbeck became my god before 
I met Corrie ten Boom in her hiding place and 
Siddhartha Hesse kept asking me questions
until I found out why a caged bird sings 
and that wars are going on always, 
sometimes in the bedroom,
sometimes far from streets.  
Angelou Birdsong led to Beloved Morrison 
and Purple Walker, and I saw with new eyes a way: 
war is going on always, always,
but to speak is to fight. Never stop fighting.

Never.  Stop.  Fighting.

Still later I met Monette and found his half-life 
beautiful — maybe mine would be, too.
I put Melville back on the shelf 55 times before 
I finally breached its first great wave and then thought: 
was Hawthorne his Moby Dick? 
Poor guy — Hawthorne was a crank 
but damn if his letters weren't good.
Woolf my Patron Saint
showed me her room so that I could want mine.
Tan and Yen Mah who made my mom cry 
because they knew, they knew — “we carry our stories” —
it wasn’t easy, not easy at all.
She loved those books.

All this and more in a library,
from my little corner one
(when LA had only one area code)
to the Library of Congress, a pilgrimage. 
Memories of mom dragging me by the hand until, 
later, I was pushing her chair to the books.
All these people, all these ghosts 
dancing and sobbing and waiting on shelves,
waiting to be held or thrown, doesn’t matter.
 
Life buoyed by imagination, 
imagination buoyed by life. 

Freedom. Adventure.  Suffering.  America.

So of course:

Arizona 
Georgia 
Illinois
Louisiana
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
South Dakota
Texas 
Wyoming

let's close the libraries. 
We wouldn’t want anybody
learnin' nothin' new…

*

“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides.”

— Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.