Non-cento from the Bureau of the Library of Alexandria

Brigit Pegeen Kelly said it burned. Hera Lindsay Bird said it burned in alphabetical order. There’s nothing left about it to say. To say, “there’s nothing left about it to say” is awfully similar to what Alberto Ríos said about the Sonoran Desert and its fires—mainly, actually, that there was only one thing left to say. Then, he said it. The way it took a thousand years and one Jack Gilbert to say we’ve forgotten the beauty in Icarian flight. And he’s right. But I’d also say, even more beautiful is the moment before Icarus flies. When he sees both outcomes reflected on the ocean in front of him and still decides there’s nothing left to lose. And sure, were Elizabeth Bishop there, with her keen clairvoyant eye, she would say the trail of wax he lost behind his wings looked exactly like disaster bobbing on the waves. Perhaps we should reframe. Mary Ruefle says The Odyssey was probably sung by sirens because none of us can turn away from the tragedy of our own lives. And the logical conclusion of this history arrives when Ocean Vuong borrows Telemachus’s clothing, finds his father with a bullet in his back, washed in by a foaming red tide. His teacher, Sharon Olds, does a similar trick—when she makes her father say “I love you” from the afterlife. We get to do this—dilute the River Styxes of the real world under the peat bogs of the mind. Like, I could tell you it didn’t matter that the Library burned—that it’s all bubblegum and cherry pie to say it stopped us from developing steam engines or penicillin in a pre-American century. But after I said that, I could take it back, like Ada Limón when American Pharaoh unstrung the gray from her sky. I have to remind myself at times of Terrance Hayes’s advice, that what it is isn’t always what it looks like. The Library burned, yes. But no one ever talks about the scribe who put it out.