Reading Room - The Gettysburg Review

The Reading Room

for Mary Jo Salter

Feet like running

water have shallowed out

each step, the stairway

scoured white,

smooth as shell.

On the landing, sunlight—

enormous windows,

left and right,

brace the reading room together:

panes like leaded

fish-mail, portholes keeping out

a sea of restless leaves.

In the rafters, carved figureheads—

twenty wooden girls

lean over the rail,

stare down the room’s hull.

Their silence, a tidal pull

one wants to board.

Anchored at the periodicals,

two men lift

rag-tipped poles,

brushing out grooves

of hair, hips

that square to stumps.

One could be my aunt,

who grew immobile by

degrees, fixed on the unseen,

and never spoke again—

though once she told

my mother Your hands are cold.

The men lean out—awkward

clacks of wood on wood,

and the only other person here,

a boy, turns thin

pages at the dictionary stand,

says the words without a sound.

- Published with a slightly different form in The Gettysburg Review, Summer 1997

Mary Jo Salter’s poem about the same space at Mount Holyoke College is called “Reading Room.”