She dislikes all those body parts
On view, naked skin exposed
In places so long covered
And pale. She is annoyed
With all the blooming
And buzzing birds do
Even late into the night,
Start before dawn. They
Give her headaches. It’s
All pretend, that joy
And merriment
Just for the job at hand.
She notes trees
That were perfectly content
To be trees and wear
Their trunks in absolute
Honesty, wave their arms
In the wind, glow
In the glistening of snow.
Suddenly, they want
Leaves to flutter, leaves
To beckon the finger
Touch of the sun.
Ruth Moose was once a librarian—years ago at Pfeiffer University, a small school near Charlotte, North Carolina. “But I was a bad librarian,” she says. “I’d get too involved. Students would come in to do research, and I’d get too excited about their papers. I’d end up going to class to hear them present.”
Clearly she belonged in the classroom rather than the stacks, so Moose left the library to teach creative writing at UNC. She is not the character who narrates her collection of poems, The Librarian, she says. That librarian is a younger, single woman; Moose was married for more than forty years and raised two sons. The Librarian is a cat person, finding dogs too fawning and needy (“I had two dogs when I wrote that,” Moose says).
But like Moose at the time she wrote the poems, the Librarian is in mourning—over HWLWG (He Who Left Without Goodbye). Moose says she may have come up with the Librarian to help her cope with her own grief in the years after her husband’s death. When Moose showed a few of the poems to her writers’ group, they demanded to hear more about this unorthodox librarian—a Jane Austen fan who listens to country music, a bookworm who loves her Jim Beam, a woman who disdains jewelry but loves lace.
“I don’t know this person,” Moose says. “I don’t know where she came from. But people—all different kinds of people—have told me that she’s someone they can relate to.”
Ruth Moose is a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her latest collection of poetry, TEA and Other Assorted Poems, was published in December 2010 by Main Street Rag. Poems reprinted with permission from The Librarian and Other Poems by Ruth Moose, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2009.