She Left a Poem in the Library Book
Page ninety-four held a stranger's heart, and then it held mine.
The poem fell out of a library copy of Crossing to Safety, page ninety-four, on a Tuesday in October when I had spoken to exactly no one for four days. Unsigned, undated, written on the back of a grocery receipt for oranges, tea, and one candle.
I had just moved to the city for a job I did remotely, which meant I had moved to the city for nothing. Forty-one years old, one van of furniture, a breakup behind me that had less ended than evaporated. I joined the library the way you buy a gym membership in January: as a message to yourself. The branch was small, underheated, and smelled like radiators and old glue, and I loved it immediately and told no one, because there was no one to tell.
The poem was eleven lines. It was about watering a plant that might already be dead. "I water it because the watering is mine," it said, and then, near the end, "green is a decision the roots make without consulting me." I read it standing between the stacks with my coat still buttoned, and I felt the specific jolt of being described by a stranger, the one that starts in the sternum. Whoever wrote this was watering something dead too... Whoever wrote this was deciding to anyway.
I should have handed it in at the desk. Lost property, local rules. Instead I did something I still can't fully account for: I went home, and on an index card, in my best handwriting, which is not good, I wrote back. Not a poem. I didn't have poems yet. Just: "I read this four times. The plant on my windowsill is a fern and I also don't know if it's alive. Thank you for the word 'decision.'" I tucked the card into page ninety-four and returned the book two weeks early.
You understand I expected nothing... A message in a bottle is a gesture, not a correspondence.
Three weeks later I borrowed Crossing to Safety again, because I missed it, or because I am a slower learner than my degrees suggest. My index card was gone... In its place, on the back of a receipt for bread and batteries, page ninety-four, was a new poem. This one was about ferns. It ended, "The fern is fine. Ferns are dramatic. Water yours and go to sleep."
I laughed alone in the stacks like a man losing his grip, and a teenager two aisles over gave me the look teenagers reserve for the unwell.
That was November. Here is what the winter became: a correspondence conducted entirely on page ninety-four of a novel neither of us apparently let anyone else borrow. I would return the book; some weeks later the branch app would tell me it was available; there would be a new poem in her handwriting, small and slanted, with the g's looping like fishhooks.
Poems about frost on the inside of a window. About her mother's recipe box, which she couldn't open yet and wouldn't throw away. About loneliness, though she never used the word; she called it "the quiet with a pulse."
We had rules, unspoken but exact. No names. No questions about names. Nothing that would collapse the thing by measuring it.
And because you cannot answer poems with index cards forever without shame, I started trying to write them. Badly, at first, with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever on ice. I signed up for an online course through a writing academy I found at two in the morning, the hour when lonely men either learn a skill or buy a kayak. I learned about line breaks. I learned my instinct to rhyme was a nervous tic.
By February I left my first real poem on page ninety-four, nine lines about eating dinner standing up at the counter because a table sets a place for the missing. Her reply came back with one line underlined and, in the margin, a single word: "More."
I have published since. Nothing has ever landed like that one word.
The reveal, when it came, was not dramatic. That's the thing nobody tells you about the turning points of your life: they happen on a Wednesday, near the photocopier. In March I picked up the book from the hold shelf, and tucked under the rubber band was the usual pink slip, "Hold for patron," with my name on it in the librarian's handwriting.
The g's looped like fishhooks.
I stood there and did the archaeology at speed. The book that was somehow always available. The hold that always worked out.
The librarian, the one with the cardigan the color of strong tea, who had checked out this same novel to me eleven times without once raising an eyebrow, who had said nothing on the Tuesday I returned it a day late in a snowstorm except, and I heard it differently now, "It gets returned. That's what matters."
She was watching me from the desk. She knew exactly what I was looking at. There was a moment, I want this on the record, when we both could have pretended... and stayed safe... and kept the thing folded neatly in a book forever.
She came around the desk instead.
Up close she had reading glasses pushed into gray-streaked hair and the expression of someone stepping off a ledge in a controlled manner.
"June," she said, and put out her hand.
"You're the fern," I said, which is the single worst introductory sentence in recorded history, and she laughed anyway, and the teenager by the photocopier looked at us both like we should be in a facility.
Over coffee, and then over many coffees, I got the rest of it. June had been slipping poems into returned books for six years. Not just my book. Dozens of books, chosen by instinct: the man who borrowed grief memoirs, the girl who kept renewing a manual on starting over, anyone whose stack looked like a flare fired over dark water. She wrote her poems on receipts because receipts felt disposable, and disposable felt safe.
"I left forty-three poems in forty-three books," she told me. "You are the only one who ever wrote back."
Forty-three. I think about the other forty-two constantly. Read, maybe, on other Tuesdays, by other people buttoned into coats, who felt the jolt in the sternum and put the poem back like it was wired to an alarm. I don't blame them. Answering cost me nothing, I had nothing, that was the whole reason I could afford it. It turns out that's what a new beginning usually is: not courage, just a person with empty hands finally being asked to hold something.
That was four years ago. The fern lived; June repotted it herself and lectures it when she waters it. Her mother's recipe box is open now, and we've cooked our way through half of it, arguing about cardamom. Last spring the library ran its annual sale, paperbacks a dollar a bag, and there it was in a bin: our copy of Crossing to Safety, withdrawn from circulation, stamped DISCARD in red like an insult.
I paid the dollar. At home I handed it to June with a pen and asked her to sign it, and she went, of course, to page ninety-four. She thought for a long time for a woman who had left her heart on receipts for six years. Then she wrote one word under all our ghosts, and dated it, and handed it back.
"Overdue."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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