That first sanctuary

21 July 2020

Selected poems Odour of Libraries

He enters a university library at thirty-five feeling like an imposter, rougher-hewn from suffering than most students, wrapped in an aura he thinks religious pilgrims experience shuffling along echoing naves of Gothic cathedrals, sombre, joyous. On this undergraduate group’s familiarisation tour he gives up trying to embed library terminology in memory to embrace personal discovery, spaces perfectly hedged by the order of books, books as landscape where the swarming mind could fall in love, this awesome new-found sanctity.

Enrolment, the first of his generation in a widespread clan suffering from the aftermath of war, the belief that only money is worth garnering, his childhood a war in itself, steers him to safe harbour in the stacks squirreling away knowledge of a ravelled world unfolding before his eyes, stupendous centuries of language, history, art, or anything else starved senses devour as books gradually displace fragile friendships.

He can’t know years from now he shall mull over a kaleidoscopic life journey, events jostling for room to replay their roles in a failing memory; can’t predict the clamorous ache to step again from the advertised world’s cunning greed, the bastardry of betrayal, into cool shadows, that first sanctuary, breathe in the sensuous whiff of recorded life, the satisfying odour of libraries, do it more thoroughly.

Bar Behaviour 101

At fourteen, wearing my work overalls, so looking older, I breast the bar’s murmuring buzz after pushing through the sesame door. Payday, air blue with cigarette smoke, a swearing stew. Women, not allowed in this jingoistic jungle, sit in the Ladies Lounge, a demi-monde of quiet drinkers. Some men wear suits, battered hats, or brilliantined hair like mine. Office personnel arrive later than day shift workers. Printers, ink-grubby hard drinkers, argue there before work. Shaky old men sipping wee glasses, ‘ponies’, treated with respect, always attend. Off-duty detectives eye this hubbub of talk, too much of this also being most men’s ritual complaint about women, those cops’ probing glares assessing me this first time with my eighteen year-old workmate.

Buying rounds, ‘shouting’, required the right words, gestures, diction rough, ensuring barely pausing barmen understood, their fluid movement artistry to me. Alert to nuances of slang, I began to relax, part of the throng though agog with need to fathom arcane rites, concerned I might jostle somebody’s drink — most guzzled beer in various sized glasses — through obvious drunkenness, or speak too loudly, big no-no’s akin to

ARTS AND CULTURE

That first sanctuary

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