Leeches, Belmont DeForest

Imagine sneaking into the stacks with a librarian who takes her cat-eyed frames off and lets her hair down, shakes her head to release curls that spiral to the bottom of her back / to the top of her hips as she lifts up her plaid skirt to offer her core, she, the librarian, clad in tights bound by lace that reach her upper inner thighs, tights I can’t decide whether to be left on or removed until I choose not to but remain torn.  Texture-of-webbing’s lexicon.  These lace rims announce entryway to her cul-de-sac and mark where desire becomes Too much is never enough.  Keep them on for readers and me as complements to the contours of your curves.  What’d ya think about choice?  Wonder what occurs inside librarian minds when free to unfurl.  You opt to keep your tights on, so it seems.  Inviting, yet elusive, it’s hard to decide where to touch with marble shapes galore.  Kind of dark in the library, this bathhouse of revived fibers, though we’re able to see each other a bit because overhead fixtures flicker, and fall sunlight streams through a few curtained windows with a leaf blower blasting outside.

Next, the librarian grabs my tie and pulls us into another row of books, appearing not stationary but rather levitational over floorboards that resemble ship decks.  Grab a parcel magnetically.  Pull it from the rack!  At present, the librarian holds in her hands, which include fingernails that later dig into my back like the stabbing passions of massage parlors, a copy of Terra Nostra wrapped in plastic as fluids begin to surface under fabrics.  Insatiable liaison.  The librarian says, “Let’s breathe together,” so we lower our noses, hers a stately Roman, onto the pages to inhale the scent of the folds, timber in motion, and we don’t consider #s 484 & 485 in the translation she holds whose figures I insert after the encounter because, initially, I’m present before the body, thus not counting, until the omnipresence of her fragrance leads me to drift from the present into the conditional and then start craving future rendezvous of flesh while also still here in this place somewhere around the world.  Apparently, the librarian finds her perfume’s source when encountering a candle burning in the foyer of an expat’s penthouse and feels thunderstruck enough to go looking for the sandalwood aroma kissed with lips and licked by tongue as whispers from my mouth fan upon her neck something she can’t quite make out, yet she welcomes the wisps of my want without saying, “What are you saying?  I can’t hear you.”  My wish is to, I say again, “Let me taste your blood.”

If leeches suck blood, those who choose to save books over saving humans might get accused of biblio-lechery.  Remember the impaired scribe, ‘tho no degeneration of his vox, who muses about a single dog being worth more than all told-tales, as well as claiming that ten minutes of any person’s life is more valuable than a library’s entire archive?  Relevantly, the librarian from above discusses with another lover during their trip to the crypt the consideration of preserving one life, even a dozen lives, or preserving collected cultural remnants known as books and confesses the prospect of burning books disturbs her more than eliminating a handful of people, if one has to choose, when she perceives a stack of leather-bound pages ablaze, smoldering beside the leather jacket sleeves of culprits who launch books onto bonfires where embers jump, the culprits—soldiers wearing tall boots and gloves harnessed to dogs lunging to mutilate protesters protesting against a decree to terminate all copies of 1920’s Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights for the good of the species.  How do others reckon with this question of flames?  Is life or letter more or less expendable, and do we change our minds when the person on the chopping block’s our beloved or a neighbor instead of a stranger from another century?

Speaking of Germans, let’s cruise to German East Africa circa 1914 by way of a local library’s summer cinema series where one enters the main floor’s periodical section whose international newspapers fasten to wooden sticks, aka hangers, named zeitungshalters in German before one descends below sea level to the basement screening room to view John Huston’s 1951 The African Queen (adapted from C.S. Forester’s 1935 novel standing erect on library shelves all over our earth), starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart who wins his only Oscar for the performance.  The movie chronicles the couple’s conversion of a steamboat into torpedo boat to destroy a German gunship patrolling a lake downriver that prevents the British from attacking.  In one memorable scene, shortly after navigating rapids and losing engine power, Bogart jumps overboard to drag the African Queen by rope with Hepburn at the helm through leech-infested reeds as Bogie sweats Gin out his pores and gets sucked-on by them leeches, tens of leeches sucking away at his limbs the same way the narrator narrates lust for the librarian, the same way readers check out books arranged in libraries impregnated with divinity in the name of time dilation’s survival without giving back to the creatures who curate said books in efforts to gallop galaxymilkdustgasmatter and, in fact, raid books in libraries like settlers occupying no other lands.  Sure, readers read like leeches who don’t return service to books or habitats; however, perhaps readers practice reciprocity by resurrecting voices of words [“on a whim”] while they read and then again when words resonate beyond pages, several hours later, say, on a bike ride or in conversation with a friend.  Oh, majestic libraries of yore, what say thy scrolls… of pyramids and planets, serpents and skyscrapers, of kitchen sinks, volumes of vampires and vacuum cleaners, of windmills and whales, of bloodsuckers?  Of Dewey Decimals? 

How about when an assailant corners you in the braille section with the ambition to suck your blood and, when you resist the advance, chases you out of the library onto the street?  Is the adrenaline produced by the pursuit and your escape attempt more potent than what’s produced by most scenes in books or movies?  Libraries function as oceanic repositories containing coral reef ecosystems full of plankton.  “What’s so great about the Barrier Reef?  What’s so fine about art?” a trainwrecked ballad croons.  As an aside, for the sake of blood letting, picture a tick’s mushroom sack engorged with blood, sucking on a dog’s neck, then handle heated tweezers as a scalpel for extraction.  Finally, for now, let’s keep in mind the bedrooms and the hospitals and libraries and the schools and post offices and food banks and latrines and the bunkers and the wells and cemeteries in Palestine bombed to almost extinction but not yet total erasure.  Let’s say, “No más,” to Amen’s commandment of, “So be it,” with such certainty, and let’s say, “Hell, no,” to efforts to eradicate her story, the librarian’s, not his story, the narrator’s, once secure in sanctuaries where you, dear reader, may greet our bloodless ghosts not throbbing in the current.