This bookshelf is the size I want it to be, by height, by width, made of wood I chose, and stained walnut, the color I picked. It has crown molding. The books in the shelf are only what I want in the shelves. Long ago they were culled to be referential, useful, well-loved, even worshipped by me. Some are taped together with duct-tape they've been read so often. And the shelf is where I want it--against a door I don't go through.
Near the shelf is an antique library staircase. I saw this and imagined a great library like one I've never had, nor seen, nor been in. But in seeing the shelves, I could imagine such a library, even though I really did not want to own one. But I did want the stairs. I wanted the stairs to be near this bookshelf, even though I knew I'd never climb them to reach a book, because my shelves were too short to need that, really. On the stairs I placed handmade pots, most bought in a dumpy store down in Texas, an art gallery in a strip-mall, owned by a hopeful woman I liked who followed me to an Indian restaurant to give me a handmade card. The pots were made by someone I don't know, and I carried them home to Seattle, one by one, trip-by-trip from my Mom's house. Near the stairs is the Bernini angel I photographed on the Ponte St. Angelo in Rome on an early-morning walk four years ago. Alone, cropped without a halo, the angel is sprayed onto a canvas with modern pixilation created by blowing up a digital photograph too large, until it breaks into pieces of colour. I made this, and I'm surprised at how much I like it. Well, I ordered it anyhow, after having designed it.
But inspite of all this choice, there is radomity and chaos spilling from this shelf. There is no order, no semblance of catalog. Volumes are placed in a jaunty disarray, the poetry mixed up with the history, the philosophy co-existing with pop-culture horror. Some books are ill-cared for, stained, and crumbling, others in near pristine condition that I've never opened since a loathed graduate course, or two, or three. Even the angel was and is an accident. I'd gone on the walk randomly, no guidebook, no notion that through the trees of the Castille, I'd end up walking over the Tiber and see angels there, nor that when I blew up the photographs two years later, they'd break apart into blocks of pixelated color I like.
A thousand imaginary trips in this shelf, places I've been in my mind, drawn along on a river of words, some centuries old, in a conversation with me, about places they went, that I want to go, or should go, or can imagine along with people who no longer exist except through these words now or pictures of pictures they painted or gardens they planted with flowers long dead. There are words I found when young and words I probably won't read until I'm old, and the occasional tome I once meant to read, but never got to and never probably will. But still, the nice thing is everything is here--because of accident--or I want it to be.
