an anniversary need: official utterances to the assembled before letting humans loose among bookrows; our conversations breathed across Dewey-decimal spines: covers and pages and shelves absorbing
decibels of burble that
rise and fall between bebop
and slide-show; soundtracked between
clattered coffee and tea cups, clinked wine glasses and cheese plates captured by camera-shuttering sequences archiving random annunciations, taping proofs we each were once living voices in Guelph
celebrating
a century and a quarter of institutional existence one night one night, the most recent page
of a thousand imperatives turned into being by long ago lending librariian believers: a public good,
individually accessed, become tales of adults and their children later turned in aging large-print readers, lifelong borrowers remembering imagined-elsewheres; realms entered in book-learned histories altering us in our own memories, words, images and momentum still self-defining us, imaginative and factual accounts now years of reading, reaffirming litanies of words, laughters sadness and mercies perfect-bound inside each of us share as inspired imaginings; the miracle of collected volumes, papers and magazines
accessible to everyone, tonight recorded on tape, an anniversary of hours, gathered to vanish down comfortable ways home
through the dark
of Westminster Woods.
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