Used

"He did not steal, but emulate!"

-- Denham, praising Cowley (qtd. in John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean?)

--

Today was full of lifts and drops.

Fit at least twenty wooden chairs and two retro-orange sofas into the back of a van. Had to rework it a few times, but got them in. The others were on the loading dock, making mummies of upended desks with packing wrap. Also loaded those chairs and sofas into the children's theatre's storage shop. It was a hot day.

Some air-conditioned reprieve, though, at the Mercantile Library in downtown Cincinnati. Took apart a metal bookshelf lacquered with fifty years. Took a vice grips to the last stubborn bolt and tasted success. Fished out hardware from a toolbox, capped the ends of bolts with rusted nuts. Discovered the floor rotten, dissolved into black dust beneath. All this, in a library ripe for renovation.

There were white busts of presidents and writers, removed from their pedestals and conferring with each other on shiny table tops. And bookshelves, of course, heavy with paginated wisdom. And midget doorways in the middle of walls and stairways which led to nowhere. It was a lovely place, and now the theatre owns one of its old bookshelves.

--

The bookshelf, chairs and desks, all saved from the auction or the heap. When we first got to the loading dock, as the trucked backed up, we stood at the rim of a wide dumpster. Piled against one end were fifty desk-and-chair units, all crome and red and yellow and mint and fading in the sun, waiting for another kind of truck. Not going to a needy school, but to the dump.

And in the warehouse: caged and packaged mattresses of every floral pattern and color, wasting, asleep on top of themselves, or warped from months leaning against a concrete wall, all of them wrapped in industrial plastic like oversized happy-meal toys. Made, but apparently not ready. Rumor is they will be moved and burned, and soon.

And in that library, books with cures. But eleven floors up from the shoppers with handbags and homeless men with beards and flannel shirts. Shelves coming down in pieces. And in a few days, renovators will rope it all away--the busts, the books--to save the floor.

--

On the ride back to the office, one woman joked that we should all get eight hours for the day. Said we were being used as manual labor.

Yes.

Another said we are such a wasteful society that it makes her sick. Said this after seeing a man, standing in the bed of a packed pick-up, heave a file cabinet from that great height into a starved dumpster.

Yes.

And yet another said that the theatre is stigmatizing itself with poverty. Asking for desks, chairs, and bookshelves that successful businesses are tossing out. Asking for decorations to use for fund-raising dinners. Asking the public to support the theatre, if not with money, then with furniture, buildings, and food--

That it is somehow wrong for the theatre to be poor, desperate, and humble.

No.