A Library at Alexandria

Joel Brouwer

After his wife kicked him out he began to date a Serbian librarian
whose apartment was a block from the zoo. From her bathtub
he could hear peacocks cry like cats stuck in trees. Sometimes
he heard the elephant. When the Caliph kicked the Romans out
of Egypt, he reasoned the library's scrolls either confirmed
the Koran and so were superfluous or crossed it and so
were heretical. And so and so. And so what? And so, legend says,
ordered them burned. And so, legend says, the flames heated
the city's baths for weeks. And so history gets written
to prove the legend is ridiculous. But soon the legend
replaces the history because the legend is more interesting.
When the water cooled he'd twist the squeaky silver tap
like a croupier at roulette, and the peacocks would squeak in reply.
When the librarian came home from work, she'd bring him tea
and sit on the fuzzy green toilet seat to keep him company
while November twilight slowly erased their faces. Something
barked, maybe a coyote. The librarian suggested the zoo
was itself a kind of library, but whether superfluous or heretical
she wasn't sure. She was certain the scrolls in Sarajevo's library
were sacred, just not to her. She trailed her pale fingers through
the tepid water and so his cock bobbed around like a cork.
She addressed it sometimes as Caesar and sometimes as stupid.