From Word To Word

I am walking through a library, vast and silent. It is coiled and intertwined, and I know with the knowing of dreams that it is also a carefully carpentered brain. Every room is up or down a few stairs or at the end of a short hallway. One always leads to another. Some are broad and brightly lit, and others are narrow, almost passageways themselves, and they are dimly lit, full of secret things. There is no end to them, and they all are filled with books.

My feet are making no sound, and I see that there are deep rugs everywhere. I see also that there are piles of books on the floor in front of every shelf, and I know that I have been piling them, working my way through the library, shelf by shelf, according to a system that I do not recognize, even as I follow it. I am running my fingers over the spine of each book, not missing one, and I am piling on the floor each that I would bring with me, each that I would bring out of that vast library and into my own. The books in the piles number in the thousands now, I know, number in the many thousands, but I keep piling them, though I am always remembering, in the strange logic of dreams, that I have no space for them on my own shelves.