Читать книгу The Interrogation - Michael Bazzett - Страница 15

The Central Registry

I slip two nights between the wooden slats.

We store them upright

to discourage warping.

Because night has a memory.

They are wrapped in brown paper,

tied up snug with twine

and surprisingly flat once folded.

I label each one neatly with a permanent marker

affixing a label to the spine for that very purpose

and then move on

to the moonlight

which needs to be poured into an aquarium

with a fungicidal solution.

So much moonlight is sickly these days.

Once, the twine broke

on a night long ago

and it started coming on—

the paper burst

with the snap of a small bore rifle

and it unfurled

like a black wing.

The force of it split the pine of the storage rack

and filled the warehouse with a pitchy blackness.

It was a fine specimen, midwinter,

late nineteenth century, moonless,

cold as a brass bell and utterly still.

You don’t see many nights

like that anymore.

Not that I’m nostalgic.

This job brooks no sentiment.

Not once you’ve smelled moonlight

when it’s gone round the bend.