Scriptorium Read online

  when our mother says, “Kill

  the Indian to save the man,”

  but the killers fail, saved

  to live to kill again (“kill”

  meaning “kill” from code

  to code, codes a child could crack

  even if his tongue’s in tatters), a war

  can be won, but not the one

  that matters.

  TYRIAN PURPLE

  Because a parchment plain and pale as sails

  doesn’t avail gold ink, and because raw silk

  for empresses must not be the shade of chalk,

  the murex-fishers bait their wicker creels

  with cockles, catch and crush the spiny snails,

  then cut the glands out for two drops of milk—

  black as clotted blood, expelled when the whelks balk—

  to make the putrid dye worth more than pearls.

  Fisher of Men, king of the purple page,

  before you died, gore matted in your hair,

  men flogged you, wound you in a purple rag.

  Ascended, enthroned in Caesar’s attire,

  your mantle now redeems you with his wage:

  twelve thousand deaths upon the shores of Tyre.

  PIGS (SEE SWINE)

  In library books, the rules for subjects long-assigned:

  for children’s tales, use “pigs”; for grown-ups’, prefer “swine.”

  How now, white sow, on which one will you dine?

  Wilbur is “some pig”; Napoleon, some swine.

  But there’s a book whose pigskin bindings shine

  for youth and aged alike, in which the terms align,

  pigs and swine; and in its stories, sow supine,

  your litter’s better bacon in a poke done up with twine.

  The Evangels spin a story from the silken ears of swine:

  the swineherds eat their lunches by the mountain’s steep decline,

  by the tombs, where wind’s perfumed with marjoram and thyme,

  with the sweet smell of the cedars, the sweet reek of the swine;

  and by the tombs, a bruised man roots for acorns, as benign

  in his iron fetters as the Son of Man, the Vine,

  who withers branches, makes blood out of wine.

  The shackled shouting man’s a temple with no shrine,

  or two thousand shrines, and every one maligned

  by other gods, other incarnations, so this text opines:

  gods unclean as hordes of hogs, scores of swine,

  hooves divided, eyes savage, tails serpentine.

  O lardlings, your Lord cometh, and you know not his design.

  He sails across still waters and his lips are caked with brine.

  Piglets, he will not give this generation a sign,

  unless that sign be read in demons, in the bristling flesh of swine.

  For “swine,” see “pneuma,” see “spirit,” see the soul unconfined.

  See incarnation thistle-pink with hock and flank and rind.

  See madman counsel madman, chapter, verse, and line.

  See spirits seek for bodies, and see the spirits find.

  See the book consign the flock, loin and heart and mind,

  to a tumble through the salty sky, their transport undefined.

  Over the cliff, swine see pigs, and pigs see swine—

  legion, yet one: porcine, insane, divine.

  OFERMOD

  Now, tell me one difference,” my sister says,

  “between Old English and New English.”

  Well, Old English has a word for our kind

  of people: ofermod, literally

  “overmind,” or “overheart,”

  or “overspirit,” often translated

  “overproud.” When the warrior Byrhtnoth,

  overfool, invited the Vikings

  across the ford at Maldon to fight

  his smaller troop at closer range,

  his overpride proved deadlier

  than the gold-hilted and file-hard

  swords the poet gleefully describes—

  and aren’t we like that, high-strung

  and ofermod as our daddy and granddaddies

  and everybody else

  in our stiff-necked mountain town,

  always with something stupid to prove,

  doing 80 all the way to the head of the holler,

  weaving through the double lines;

  splinting a door-slammed finger

  with popsicle sticks and electrical tape;

  not filling out the forms for food stamps

  though we know we qualify.

  Sister, I’ve seen you cuss rivals,

  teachers, doctors, bill collectors,

  lawyers, cousins, strangers

  at the red light or the Walmart;

  you start it, you finish it,

  you everything-in-between-it,

  whether it’s with your fists,

  or a two-by-four, or a car door,

  and it doesn’t matter that your foe’s

  stronger, taller, better armed.

  I don’t tell a soul when I’m down

  to flour and tuna and a half-bag of beans

  so you’ve not seen me do without

  just to do without, just for spite

  at them who told us,

  “It’s a sin to be beholden.”

  If you’re Byrhtnoth

  lying gutted on the ground,

  speechifying at the troops he’s doomed,

  then I’m the idiot campaigner

  fighting beside his hacked-up lord

  instead of turning tail,

  insisting, “Mind must be the harder,

  heart the keener, spirit the greater,

  as our strength lessens.”

  Now, don’t that sound familiar?

  We’ve bought it all our lives

  as it’s been sold by drunkards,

  bruisers, goaders, soldiers,

  braggers with a single code:

  you might be undermined, girl,

  but don’t you never be undermod.

  LAMPBLACK

  Black as a charred plum-stone, as a plume

  from a bone-fire, as a flume of ravens

  startled from a battle-tree—this lantern resin

  the monk culls from soot to quill the doom

  and glory of the Lord won’t fade. The grime

  of letters traced upon the riven

  calf-skin gleams dark as fresh ash on a shriven

  penitent, as heaven overawing time.

  World’s Glim, Grim Cinderer, is it sin

  or history or a whimsied hex that burns

  all life to tar? We are dust, carbon

  spilled out from your Word, a lamp overturned

  into the pit of pitch beneath your pen,

  the inkhorn filled before the world was born.

  FORTUNES OF MEN

  When a youngun’s born,

  only God, the Anointer, knows

  what the winters have in store:

  the Lord is on him like a duck

  on a junebug; the Lord tracks her

  like a trained coonhound

  and orders fate and fortune

  just as it pleases him to do.

  To each he gives a dab:

  one will wring enough of chickens’ necks

  to get to where she hates

  the smell of chicken and dumplings.

  One will work the dirt; one will punch

  a timecard; one will be too agitated

  to hold down any job for long.

  It is one’s doom to get switched

  all through life. (The Measurer makes

  trees bear switches in their seasons.)

  Another will rev his Dodge

  around the lake of a Saturday night,

  lit up on Old Crow,

  but will never wreck, never run

  some innocent off the road;

  that lucky one will fall

&nbs
p; into the yard and pass out

  safely in the grass that God,

  the Sower, made to be his bed.

  A certain one mixes Xanax and methadone;

  his veins shake him to a youthful death,

  and his mother forgets for a moment

  her husband’s dealings with some skank,

  her slide into the yellow Camaro

  of some high-school boy;

  her own name is weary to her.

  One must wear the badge,

  must kick in the doors

  of pot growers and meth heads;

  and one must get his door kicked in.

  So has the Enforcer planned it,

  to whom men must give thanks.

  A certain one must get a job

  (the only job for miles around,

  as the Lord, the Overseer,

  ordains) dynamiting

  mountains to get at the coal;

  another one must use the coal

  to heat her stove; another one

  must use the coal to heat

  her curling iron. A certain one

  gets rich converting cheap land,

  pure water, cheap labor into rayon.

  One must fix a supper every night;

  and one must give the supper away

  to them worse off just down the pike.

  One is good at figures; one is good

  at nailing boards; one is good

  at telling tales; one is good

  at meanness; one is good

  at making do; one is good

  at taking rednecks for a ride.

  Must one sing of this? One must:

  to a certain one is given the harp,

  which like the sword does not depart

  from this land; and that one must

  praise God for the sorrow

  he creates. So the mighty Lord,

  the Regulator, deals out to all

  across the surface of the earth—

  and also in these hills, which he makes

  to crumble, as befits his notions,

  and his plenty, and his mercies,

  which one cannot resist, but does.

  NICODEMUS MAKES AN ANALYSIS

  Thesis: That the body cannot repent

  of its own nativity, cannot re-form,

  like water can, into clouds or ice

  or tides. That the body can only pull

  forward: does not Qoheleth say

  the silver cord snaps, the golden bowl

  crashes, the jar is shattered at the spring?

  So I have it in my annotations: the body

  ages, bones raging to return to crushed stone,

  decomposing leaves. The living body,

  by the time it’s old, must be full of earth

  ground into its pores—from decades

  of work or play or travel; or from inertia,

  bands of dust settling, as onto bookshelves,

  into layers of marrow—so fertile, flowers

  could bloom from anyone’s eyes or mouth.

  Grass withers, flowers fall, writes the Prophet.

  And eloquently, I might add—not like this youth

  who can’t construct a story with any unity

  of metaphor, who weaves and warps

  his plainclothes homilies without regard

  for the listener’s sensibilities. And clarity?

  He quips a snippet from the Psalmist—

  out of context, to be sure—and slaps it on

  his ramblings as a patch. But I digress

  from my topic. Thesis: That the body

  is only made for one space, one duration.

  On the shore, the spines and ribs of what were fish—

  tiny harps, the music drummed out of them

  by the sea. Water, then salt.

  Is an old man’s body any different?

  Methuselah, who outlived even rocks,

  did so in the one body; Enoch, who sidestepped

  death, did so in the one body. Thesis:

  That our bodies are too ravaged in their wanderings,

  their meal-takings and slumberings, to desire

  more than one gestation. Is this the way

  you think? he said. The way you see?

  And left me no time to reply, to show him

  my sources, all I have collected. Years

  of marginalia and notations—all disseminated,

  as by a bellows-blast. My life’s work!

  He would have nothing of it, but kept up

  his discourse. No data, no statistics—his logic

  one of circles circling circles, his proofs

  spinning and arcing, never lighting: phylacteries

  opened, their frail contents flown.

  I sat. I studied the fire. And I followed,

  not his argument, but his gestures, his fingers

  tricking my vision in the shadows. Such fingers—

  I cannot sleep for thinking about them, how thin

  the skin on the tips, as if they were made of paper.

  Thesis: That each of his fingers is a page

  from a water-sodden book—the meanings

  delicate, on the verge of being torn apart,

  rendered unreadable. That his face

  is the face that the wind wears when it carries rain

  or scratches the thunder purple and blue.

  Whoever watches the wind will not plant,

  whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.

  I forget who said that. And I’m no longer sure

  which citations I might wish to keep: my body

  of work immaterial, like water condensed

  to mere conjecture—what once filled

  a river, a cup, a womb, nothing but air.

  Hypothesis: That my books are wrong—

  or riddled with misprints, faulty definitions.

  Come morning, I must make a few revisions.

  BIBLIA PAUPERUM

  This fold-out triptych, gilded comic book,

  is mostly images, sufficient

  for the poor to understand;

  Gothic-scripted reds and blues and golds

  provide the bit of text the pastor’s flock

  can’t read and aren’t allowed to touch.

  In the middle panel, the Magi give

  their patrons’ wages to the child,

  who doesn’t know what money is;

  on the left, Abner switches to David’s side

  after stabbing David’s men

  (a gold staff makes an enemy a friend);

  on the right, Sheba offers Solomon gold

  (what is gold to a rich man but a boring story

  he still likes hearing over and over?).

  On a different page, the first priest,

  Melchizadek, hands bread to Abraham,

  while in another panel manna falls,

  gilt-outlined globes Moses plucks from the sky

  and gives to the people, who have nothing

  but a leader and their shared hunger;

  in the center panel, the Last Supper,

  the cup is gold, the bread is gold,

  and the bread’s not for the body

  but the spirit. The colors are so garish,

  even the poor can understand

  (not the poor in spirit but the poor

  in fact) what illuminates

  Christ’s dough-white face—the waste

  of love, the supper gone cold without a taste.

  MINIUM

  The monk stipples the page with convoluted trails

  of lead toasted rust-red, brick-red, the color

  first used for rubric and for miniature.

  Three thousand tiny dots prick the initials,

  as if the text itself were pierced with nails,

  red edging each green, black, or yellow letter

  to embolden the story of Christ’s dolor

  and his murder, his earthborn travails.

  Some letters aren’
t filled in. The red dots, wrapped

  obsessive round the page, perhaps so vexed

  their maker that the monk just stopped—

  or else he didn’t know what happened next

  and so kept dotting, blotting, dotting, trapped

  inside Christ’s body, a bloody outline with no text.

  ANAGRAM: SEE A GRAY PINE

  in memory, Ena Gay Pierce

  See a gray pine in January that ought to be green

  See me pining for a gray-headed one

  See the gray shale with its pines unpinned

  See a pin from her pincushion under the bed

  See a gray cookpot of pinto beans

  See gray hairs caught in an old bobby pin

  See me gray, still pining

  Whose gray hills are these, unpined?

  Gray crone: thine

  SOLIDUS OF THE EMPRESS IRENE, AD 797–802

  Numismatists know it’s just a coin

  despite its name, related to the Latin

  for safe—salvus—

  and entire—sollus—

  for the safety money brings,

  for the entirety it becomes to kings,

  homeowners, parents, execs,

  all of us whose bills are due before our checks.

  It’s not an icon, though the gold’s the same

  as the gold membrane

  surrounding Mary, Jesus, Elijah, John,

  all constellated around Irene

  on this gray wall, Irene the iconodule,

  who made icons the center of her rule

  after she stole the throne from Constantine

  the 6th, her son, whom she had blinded, an icon

  with his painted eyes scratched out. Irene’s

  four ringlets clink like strings of coins,

  her eyes are coins, her tunic’s printed

  with tiny coins. She glints new-minted