After the Library Locks

The librarian turns the key, and the room exhales; stacks settle like dark pines after wind. Dust lifts in the last amber strip of sun, a soft weather of erased fingerprints.

Between atlases, oceans keep folding themselves, blue muscle and salt under cloth-bound skin. A moth taps the window, pale as a lost receipt, wanting in, or out, or simply the light.

On the long table, abandoned notes wait face-down, small boats at a dock no one names. Ink still wet in one corner glints like a street at dusk, holding the shape of a hand that has gone home.

When the lamps go black, the books go on speaking: not in words, but in weight, in cedar, glue, and the faint metal taste of rain carried inside by coats and left to dream.