of what is not written, the archive only dreams

of what is not written, the archive only dreams

When the archive dreams of Pittsburgh, smoke pours
from the stacks, and librarians don goggles, wrap the books
in tarp. When the archive dreams of Pittsburgh, I perch

on an overhead crane and watch as a silhouette
emerges from a row of hook blocks, shimming
with a pole to flip open the furnace. Molten 

spreads along paper under the red light 
of a junkie’s darkroom. I stumble into the parking lot,
where the Archivist kneels, easing gas masks off

goldfinches. They lean back on their heels, unhook 
their collar—already blackened— lift a fresh one 
from a nearby briefcase. We are high up

in an office at Gulf Oil unwrapping a roast beef sandwich.
Meanwhile the archive dreams of a woman taking off 
her apron, sitting in the quiet, her coffee speckled

with the three drops of cream she allows herself. I want
to sit next to her but even the Archivist’s magic only 
takes us to the lip of the unrecorded. Once I fell

in love with a woman who’d been a thief. She kept
her juvenile release papers in a box with dried out
Wet n’ Wild makeup to remind us how little we have

to take from them. She touched me like a lockpick,
like she was listening for tumblers to click into place. 
She touched me as if I wasn’t already a gate hanging

from broken hinges. In the parking lot, I finger ruffles
edged in gold on the porcelain doll the Archivist slipped
into my pocket before the librarians joined us. 

I remember finding one just like it—or is this the same one?—
amidst scarves and perfume bottles in my grandfather’s attic, 
an elegant dream of summer blushing under parasols 

along an American river, a reminder a woman lived 
in this house, made it possible for us to forget her.