We found them on a hunt for illuminated texts on the second floor of the library
in a quiet wing towards the back, a room with celadon green carpeting
and dark shelves—the paperback romances.
Windows lined one wall but we wouldn’t have looked out the windows.
We four sat and read aloud passages when we should’ve been writing papers.
We laughed at the tropes (she was klutzy and had no idea she was beautiful,
he was a cad who wanted to be a dad) but after “Her skin grew hot
with his gaze” we grew silent. In an almost holy way. We leaned against the shelves
and then eventually sprawled onto our stomachs where instead of listening
like nymphs to Orpheus, we read to ourselves (the heat grew between her legs,
she came in mind-shattering waves, luckily she was on the pill).
Light faded and someone mentioned the dining hall closing
so we wrapped scarves, hauled on peacoats, and trudged up the hill
through broken-up and frozen-over floes of December snow.
In our warm, incandescent rooms we returned
to comparing Van Gogh’s potatoes to Williams’s plums.
Later my friend confessed she went alone to the paperback room the next day
and stunned herself with how she couldn’t stop reading.
She was the most honest of us all about the chaos of her body,
and in that icy cloister of stone and bookish girls
I fell deeper for her (after all, the safest place is to be hidden,
but still to see) and her thirst for these objects
of obsession. Her study was not even as a bid for self-possession
but simply as a woman who plays with the wild deities
guarding dusty truths in the next room.