Selected beginning of "Book III, The Library"
by William Carlos Williams
I love the locust tree
the sweet white locust
How much?
How much?
How much does it cost
to love the locust tree
in bloom?
A fortune bigger than
Avery could muster
So much
So much
the shelving green
locust whose bright small leaves
in June
lean among flowers
sweet and white at
heavy cost
A cool of books
will sometimes lead the mind to libraries
of a hot afternoon, if books can be found
cool to the sense to lead the mind away.
For there is a wind or ghost of a wind
in all books echoing the life
there, a high wind that fills the tubes
of the ear until we think we hear a wind,
actual
Drawn from the streets we break off
our mind's seclusion and are taken up by
the book's winds, seeking, seeking
down the wind
until we are unaware which is the wind and
which the wind's power over us
to lead the mind away
and there grows in the mind
a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms
whose perfume is itself a wind moving
to lead the mind away
through which, below the cataract
soon to be dry
the river whirls and eddys
First recollected.
Spent from wandering the useless
streets these months, faces folded against
him like clover at nightfall, something
has brought him back to his own
mind
In which a falls unseen
tumbles and rights itself
and refalls—and does not cease, falling
and refalling with a roar, a reverberation
not of the falls but of its rumor
unabated
Beautiful thing,
my dove, unable and all who are windblown,
touched by the fire
and unable,
a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense
with its reiteration
unwilling to lie in its bed
and sleep and sleep, sleep
in its dark bed.