Of Books and Silence

He is guiding me,
a man in a red fez,
beside what seems to be a line of bookcases
but what he holds in his hand is a long curved oar
with which he moves our flat-bottomed skiff forward
between the windows and spires, the winding facades of the drowned city.

Yes, he says,
all the books of the earth are here,
including those that to you
are not yet written.
Your books are here too somewhere
though we have not come for them.
I want most of all for you to feel this place,
to have the sense that it is here
on the earth’s other side.
When you wake
you will remember the feel of the water under you,
the freshness of the air
in this moment of always beginning
and these delicately tinted mirrors of glass that are books.
No-one can read them all—
it is enough to drift between them
as we are doing.
The light that drips from them,
from the slightly ajar edges that are their pages,
is enough to guide you home.

—And the books, I ask,
what do they say?
Facing my last years of pain and my death,
what do they say?

—As we drift past, he says,
place your hand beside this row of light-blue windows
that are also books.
Now listen: do you understand?
The silence changes.