The Librarian Decides on Cryonics

Just his head, stuffed with children's books

and the thin yellow cards of the catalogue,

tissue ruffled and scored with red letters

of microfiche. Right and left halves,

aisles where the bad novels grow worse

and the good novels go unread.

And not that it was easy to make this decision,

when he met the cryologist at a party

it was doubt and mixed drinks, the cherry

of the lush present dangling on its thin stem

into their glasses. Just talk.

That's when the books reached into his life

with their thin jackets and took his loved ones,

one by one, a father, an aunt, the grandmother

whose jellies well deserved their local reputation.

It became obvious, the fragility of life,

the slim volumes filled with their choices:

to die or be frozen, freezedried.

He'll have a new body, though. It's expensive

to freeze a body, one so footnoted with cancer

and bad vision as his will be.

Hats off, then, to the librarian,

his head that is, strapped in a steel urn

in a one-way glass building,

catalogued and paid up through 2200.

With all the time in the world to kill,

and the entire backlog of the humanities

to take his time on, thawing out and catching up.