Library Storm

     A September storm sweeps in from the south, shaking the leafy branches tinted amber by summer scorn. Some fly off the trees, clawing over the roof like witches on broomsticks. I'm sitting in the library, working from home, the tall wooden towers of my bookshelves lurking over me, meditating on my silence; all the stories, songs, and facts curled up in scrolls of wisdom. They watch over me, my sisters on the shelves, each book a totem to my experiences, each journal an artifact of discovery. The storm enters the room, blows their words around in a whirlwind, speckling the ceiling in constellations of mythological truth.
    I turn on the Golf channel, not because I enjoy golf, but because it relaxes me. The soothing voices always do; they are friendly reminders to take a break from the inner tempest while the outer one stirs beyond. My wife makes fun of me for it, but the books know the truth; the voices are the soft signatures of inner peace, like the serenity of their sentences. 

    Slowly dozing off under ink-scented candlelight the outer tempest shakes my body while the sisters are singing lullabies that sink me into the sultry pages where the ancient elders illuminate me with the grace of God, he whom the tomes worship in their virginal slumber warping me away from the numbers on account, all the way back to when I was a boy in the sixth grade chasing rainbows off the asphalt hoop-rim, their chorus of voices parting my lips and the candlewick blackening and my flesh shivering among the threads of timber that dress my region from endless rain clouds that return every fall, their voices guiding me across the loamy windswept mountains where each book is a summit I must scale in my head to reach some forbidden version of reality transformed by inner dialect with dead sages speaking to me from beyond the grave and I see them, yes, I witness their stories as rich astral paintings conjured from sensitive eyes masked behind a rosy face that refused material richness for believing I was ugly, and I give them my story too, my long road out of the hell that Milton wrote leads up to light and the wind blows this dream off the map and into their medium so that I become them, a soft guiding light, a weak ember in a strong body, listlessly embalmed by light.