Enter the North Dakota Librarian by Gary Gildner

Paris Review Spring 2002

whose eyes are a fair, spiky green
I only see on my hands
and knees at spring’s initial offerings, how
can she help me? I say I seek the bloom
clarity achieves fending off confusion’s weedy
waylays upon rich indirection, I hope
I won’t be much trouble. Her lips forming
perhaps amusement, she tells me the tongue
of a woodpecker circles its brain
before coming out, and invites me to pursue
further, quietly. Gladly falling
to a whisper, noting a slight
shift in her hips, I wonder might her line be
French, it’s the short boyish hair, the poof
in certain gestures of the hand. No, no,
whispering back, she’s deep south and far north
to the bone, a hot and cool pearly mix,
which may help explain her passion
for the wolf, the solitude
of snow surrounding her every stride, and after
an evening’s skiing crawling into the tent
she carries along no matter what
the temperature is, because she is also crazy
about the high view, about
Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran
and the Pleiades, whew, how faithful they are, over
and under, like wolves, you see, and sometimes
she can’t bear to say adieu, raising one
not unfriendly auburn eyebrow. Mercy, where
are we? I venture. The Flickertail State, come
winter’s dead center 70,000 square miles of often
chipped-tooth nights that call for more basil, more
sweet paprika in the marinara, pretty much where
we’re headed, she says, the heart, that is,
of frost, upheaval. Adding she is a former
farmgirl who can take it, whose legs
were made firm running over the fields,
both away from and toward. Nearly breathless
I am still back at that saucy splice, the steamy
aromas I hunger for her rustic cum.
bookish fingers to release rubbing fine
sundry herbals pleasuring our mixed portions,
both principal and adjacent. What do I know,
she inquires, about golden eagles? Absolutely
a minimum, I manage. The male,
she says, will pick up a stone—A small stone? I say—
Yes, she says, small, and will fly with it
maybe two hundred feet straight up
and then drop it—Drop it? I say—and she
says. Yes, and then will dive
down and catch it before it lands. I am
made weak in the thighs thinking how
hers made firm by rural-rearing were even
firmer now from striding under the stars, under
such a bright snatch. And now
clearly caught, she says, the female
eagle takes up the game but may
drop something entirely different: a clod
of dirt, a stick, even a dead squirrel
for we are, are we not, in the Flickertail
State—soaring, dropping, diving, catching,
they go, on and on—And then? and then?
I say. Then? she says, then? Why
they must meet, of course, and conclude,
she whispers.