The Librarian in the Trees
By DJ Savarese
after Eduardo Corral
1. Who needs water with so many wings?
2. A Dewey Decimal System for feathers.
3. The librarian in the trees says, “Quiet!”
4. "I felt an intimacy with [birds]...bordering on frenzy [that] must accompany my steps through life." –John James Audubon.
5. Bird shit: a Malthusian catastrophe.
6. To go out on a limb.
7. I would like to be a pelican, I think, because penguins are much too theological.
8. With my eyes I scoop fish from the air.
9. Must love always be a form of taxidermy?
10. Audubon tied yarn to the legs of the Eastern Phoebe and thereby discovered that it nested in the same place every year.
11. Ornithologists call this bird banding.
12. I call it autism, or as the experts like to say dismissively perseveration.
13. Let us persevere with detail.
14. The yellow beak, the red beak, the brown beak, the black beak.
15. With my eyes I scoop fish from the air.
16. The world is not a zoo.
17. Nor is it an aviary.
18. Nor a dictionary.
19. When Nadia, an autistic savant, learned to speak, she lost her drawing skills.
20. At three she had rivaled Vermeer.
21. Does diversity have a call number?
22. The librarian in the trees says, “Quiet!”
23. To go out on a limb.
24. No duckling is ever ugly.
25. Say a prayer for David.
26. In autism categories do not wish to rule the world.
27. Rather, they attend; they procreate.
28. Like rabbits.
2. A Dewey Decimal System for feathers.
3. The librarian in the trees says, “Quiet!”
4. "I felt an intimacy with [birds]...bordering on frenzy [that] must accompany my steps through life." –John James Audubon.
5. Bird shit: a Malthusian catastrophe.
6. To go out on a limb.
7. I would like to be a pelican, I think, because penguins are much too theological.
8. With my eyes I scoop fish from the air.
9. Must love always be a form of taxidermy?
10. Audubon tied yarn to the legs of the Eastern Phoebe and thereby discovered that it nested in the same place every year.
11. Ornithologists call this bird banding.
12. I call it autism, or as the experts like to say dismissively perseveration.
13. Let us persevere with detail.
14. The yellow beak, the red beak, the brown beak, the black beak.
15. With my eyes I scoop fish from the air.
16. The world is not a zoo.
17. Nor is it an aviary.
18. Nor a dictionary.
19. When Nadia, an autistic savant, learned to speak, she lost her drawing skills.
20. At three she had rivaled Vermeer.
21. Does diversity have a call number?
22. The librarian in the trees says, “Quiet!”
23. To go out on a limb.
24. No duckling is ever ugly.
25. Say a prayer for David.
26. In autism categories do not wish to rule the world.
27. Rather, they attend; they procreate.
28. Like rabbits.
Copyright Credit: DJ Savarese, "The Librarian in the Trees" from Swoon (Nine Mile Books, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by DJ Savarese. Reprinted by permission of DJ Savarese.
Source: Nine Mile Books and Literary Magazine, 2022