Granny’s Attic
Up a steep and narrow stair I climb, because the grownups
are napping, and that’s where the books are.
Up a narrow stair and at the top, I pause
under the eaves where silverfish scuttle.
Wood planks creak under sneakered feet as I tiptoe past
old file cabinets and an exhausted swivel chair.
I’m in the inner sanctum now where the books live.
I’m pretty sure I can I hear them breathe.
I choose carefully, paying attention to ornamentation,
the color of covers (red is good) and the delicious oddness of words.
Slowly, I fall into a world of outlandish splendors
jumbled together: the vast kingdom of Oz,
charted by an ordinary girl, the Alhambra
at dusk and, in an odd blue book
with small dark type, a world inhabited by a stern man
and his sorrowful wife who hides a secret in her belly;
something about God, something about a devil.
Does anyone know I’m up here?
And then a book about a girl at the top of the world
who drinks goat’s milk from a wooden bowl.
I know I have stumbled on the secret garden, or
the cozy book-lined tower abandoned
by Rapunzel and her lover and I wonder—why
did she let that man climb up her hair and take her away?
Downstairs, a family turns the pages of boisterous lives. Up here,
sun slips through windowpanes. Rain rattles on the old slate roof
and I know, I know,
I am never coming down.
(Wazee Journal)
