The Library

was never that one place,
with its plate of events, the door,
the street, those sounds leaking
from each house in a row
and autumn dancing leaves,
street lights at seven, rain,
Frau Von Halsting sitting by
her window, listening to
footsteps which have been there
for five hundred years.

My library was the ocean,
that space between one place
and the next, touching down
on the fifth planet of a class F
star where everything is strange;
building, learning, adjusting,
forever remaining slightly displaced.