Words

Rough-cut paper tells you it’s a first edi­tion and the must takes you back —
Years spent, nose down. Ink-smudges and foun­tain nibs, the romance
Of Umberto Eco and sharp-edged medi­eval scores. There’s a deep
Con­nec­tion through time to these com­munit­ies of scribes,
Mar­ginal notes grip­ing about aching hands and the bas­tardry of abbots.
The stitches bind­ing ancient alman­acks weave together seasons,
Prac­tical plant­ing along­side mys­ter­i­ous hints at magic and moons.

Some­times I have a sense that we sit at the far end of a skein
That has trav­elled from Ea-Nasir to now, and that some day soon,
The very last word to be com­mit­ted to a phys­ical form will be printed,
And prob­ably — sadly, inev­it­ably — by machine rather than by hand,
And not with any grand ver­mil­lion embossed Ini­tial, nor any ornament,
Nor inscrib­ing the won­ders of the world for the elu­cid­a­tion of the wicked.
Even the words call to me — codex and quire, scriptorum and majuscule.

The immens­ity of the writ­ten word over­whelms — the secrets it unfolds:
The broad­sheets exhort­ing res­ist­ance; the front page announ­cing war;
The spidery hand record­ing gen­er­a­tions; the flour­ish of a guestbook;
The passing down of closely held recipes; the decod­ing of dev­ast­at­ing plans;
the exchange of deli­cious intimacies between lovers, scrawled
on hast­ily folded let­ters sent through unsus­pect­ing post…

None of these worlds were the sum of the moments cap­tured on their pages.
In all of them, from clay to parch­ment to vellum to rags to tree pulp,
Life was more com­plex and more tedi­ous than it appears from afar.
My wall is covered with shelves and my shelves are filled with books
And yet these words are craf­ted from elec­trons and light
In a pal­impsest more flimsy than the thin­nest onionskin.