Brooklyn Public Library Poem by Bernard Henrie

I live in the Brooklyn Public Library
shut in and unread for days at a time.
my Dewey Decimal number slurred,
Cover sunned, the odd fox spot, aged.
I wheeze grateful for radiator heat
and the wheeled trip to the solarium.

A woman once fell asleep with me
in arms, I nuzzled against her chest
until sated she replaced me carefully
in the basement stacks. Her steps
falling away like a poem written
for gambled beams of street light.

I've traveled. Rubbed shoulders
with books on the poetry review desk,
slept between tangled lovers,
myself celebrated by a saxophone
and baritone reader in a cellar café.

I have been kept in coat pockets,
misplaced in the railroad depot,
forgotten on lawn chair in the rain,
shared a breakfast table with oranges
and given away as a prize, memorized
and asked to awaken the heart,
the silent heart fathoms down in sleep.

A woman writes in the margin:

In a bookstore, browsing, if I would find this poem,
I would be so mesmerized. Then reading everything
written in this book they might leave me there,
closing the shop around me, not to disturb the woman
drugged by the old book.