Scriptorium

Home > Other > Scriptorium > Page 3
Scriptorium Page 3

by Melissa Range

as a newfound sun or a new-named land,

  though she won’t spend,

  and though she’s resistant

  to corrosion, she’s so thin she could be bent

  by hand. It’s not an icon but an impress,

  though the gold’s the same. Less

  use than a penny in the reaches

  of my pocketbook, than God in the clutches

  of an unbeliever,

  but she’ll rule this wall forever,

  deposed Irene iconodule,

  who finished her poor life in exile, carding wool.

  INCARNATIONAL THEOLOGY

  after Jürgen Moltmann

  God suffers in us, where love suffers,”

  writes the theologian of the cross,

  the fate awaiting all God’s lovers.

  You are my beloved, says the Father

  as his dove rips through clouds to bless

  the Son with suffering. In us, where love suffers,

  Christ’s ache throbs closer than a brother’s—

  stabbing my breasts, my thighs, his loneliness,

  the fate awaiting all God’s lovers.

  God takes on flesh and thinks he’ll smother.

  Reeling, obsessed, his heart a wilderness,

  God’s a mess, suffering in me as I suffer

  over a torn leaf, a tore-up man, the others

  I’ve tried to love, shorn to the bone and luckless

  as the Son. What fate’s awaiting all the lovers

  who dwell in me as migraines, as a stutter

  in the veins, whose loss grows in me like grass?

  God suffers them gladly. In us, love suffers:

  it’s the grace awaiting all God’s lovers.

  WOAD

  “Every word of the Lord written by the scribe

  is a wound on Satan’s body.”—CASSIODORUS, 6TH CENTURY

  Once thought lapis on the carpet page, mined

  from an Afghani cave, this new-bruise clot

  in the monk’s ink pot grew from Boudicca’s plot—

  a naturalized weed from a box of black seeds found

  with a blue dress in a burial mound.

  Knobs of leaves that reeked like cabbage rot,

  steeped and strained for Britons’ battle paint, wrought

  the Gospels’ splotched knotwork, the monk’s dyed hand.

  Gouged with quills, woad-hued blots beneath your hide,

  Lucifer, who can understand your blues?

  I can: the Lord invades my piece of sod

  to set up a scriptorium, introduce

  true indigo, and build a Roman road;

  he knots my blue veins till I can’t refuse.

  HIT

  Hit was give to me,

  the old people’s way of talking,

  and hit’s a hit

  sometimes. Sometimes hit

  is plumb forgot

  and I drop the “h”

  that starts hillbilly,

  hellfire, hateful,

  hope. Sometimes hit

  hits the back of my teeth

  and fights hits way out

  for hit’s been around

  and hit’s tough:

  hit’s Old English,

  hit’s Middle, hit’s country,

  hit will hit on you

  all day long

  if you’ll let hit.

  When I hit the books

  they tried to hit

  hit out of me,

  but hit’s been hit

  below the belt

  and above and hit

  still ain’t hit

  the sack. Sometimes

  you can hit hit

  like a nail on the head,

  and sometimes hit

  hits back.

  VERNACULAR THEOLOGY: MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG

  In the muddy stretch between the market and the church

  a song flows from a tavern, and it soaks the roads

  in melted gold; a girl picks flowers from the ditches,

  and her lover’s kisses whisper in each broken stem;

  the bells for vespers burn a gasp of sun

  into the moon, into my chest, into the host.

  And all of this happens in German—from my tongue,

  German overspills, light lilting from itself onto the water.

  When I pray, the prayer is German; when I love,

  I love in German, and thus my Lover’s mouth replies.

  And when I, weak as a wind-stroked dove,

  love into silence, my silences are German,

  and they are so nicely honeycombed.

  I know no Latin. Nor does the girl who reads

  the letters of her lover’s name in every coiling cloud;

  or the maids who wash and kiss, with oils, the dead;

  or my sisters who wind their thumbs

  with thread as red as wine-drenched bread.

  My Lover bestowed Latin—a tabernacle, a gilded chest—

  to some servants; they write, tight-lipped,

  the Bridegroom from his bed into a crypt.

  They would lock him in their books and eat the key.

  But he kissed German into me. He sings,

  a burning mountain; he aches, a churning tree.

  So a lofty crag yearns into stones: for he desires

  to shatter into every tongue, not die, unbroken,

  inside one. The end of Latin is where I begin,

  where my Lover takes his shape. On the page,

  in my mouth, such sweetness, crushed—

  O German, you taste like a grape.

  TO SWAN

  If you won’t swear, you’ll have to swan.

  Nana did it all day long.

  She swanned at weather, swanned at news.

  Her Bible told her it was wrong

  to swear an oath before the Lord.

  Granddaddy Range had said so, too

  (when she was a foul-mouthed bride

  and their marriage was new),

  and so she swanned and cleaned,

  swanned and canned, swanned and fanned,

  while across town, Ena swore.

  I swear she never swanned;

  she swore she never cussed.

  When Nana was in the nursing home,

  her mind stretched big enough for anything,

  she loved a good fuck you and a good goddamn.

  Ena (who wouldn’t stop her swearing

  for another dozen years)

  sat by Nana, didn’t mutter even shit,

  didn’t drop a goddamn tear,

  but looked at Nana’s swan-white hair,

  then looked at me, then at her hands,

  as if by looking she could find

  words as calm as swans, as grand.

  ULTRAMARINE

  Beyond the blue scum sea, miners assault

  lazurite and pyrite, a blue-gold beam,

  pry from limestone caverns the lapis seam

  for the shade that painters’ patrons so exalt

  to hem the Virgin’s mantle, foam the Vault

  where she’s fixed like a lodestar or a gem.

  Mixed with wax and turpentine, by the dram

  this powdered stone costs more than gold or salt.

  Stella Maris, Blue-Eyed Lady of the Whale-

  Road, God tore your veil into the seas

  that hide Leviathan’s blue fluke and flail,

  the skies that hold the sailor’s compass

  made of ice-trussed stars. You’re vessel of the swell,

  and all the deep will be your swaddling clothes.

  CROOKED AS A DOG’S HIND LEG

  Yanking my lank hair into dog-ears,

  my granny frowned at my cowlick’s

  revolt against the comb, my part

  looking like a dog’s shank

  no matter what she did, crooked

  as the dogtrot path

  out the mountain county I left

  with no ambitions to return,

  rover-minded a
s my no-count granddaddy, crooking

  down switchbacks that crack the earth

  like the hard set of the mouth

  women are born with where I’m from.

  Their faces have a hundred ways to say

  “Don’t go off,” “Your place is here,”

  “Why won’t you settle down?”—

  and I ignored them all like I was one

  of their ingrate sons (jobless, thankless,

  drugged up, petted to death), meandering

  like a scapegrace in a ballad,

  as a woman with no children likes to do,

  as a woman with crooked roots knows she can.

  “When you coming home?” my granny

  would ask when I called, meaning “to visit”

  but meaning more “to stay,”

  and how could I tell her

  that the creeks crisscrossing

  our tumbledown ridges

  are ropes trying to pull my heart straight

  when it’s a crooked muscle,

  its blood crashing in circles?

  Why should I tell her

  that since I was a mop-headed infant

  and leapt out of my baby bed,

  I’ve been bent on skipping

  the country, glad as a chained-up hound

  until I slipped my rigging?

  What could I say but “I’ll be home Christmas,”

  what could I hear but “That’s a long time,”

  what could I do but bless

  the crooked teeth in my head

  and dog the roads that lead all ways

  but one?

  ALL CREATION WEPT

  And not just those disciples

  whom he loved, and not just

  his mother; for all creation

  was his mother, if he shared

  his cells with worms and ferns

  and whales, silt and spiderweb,

  with the very walls of his crypt.

  Of all creation, only he slept,

  the rest awake and rapt with grief

  when love’s captain leapt

  onto the cross, into an abyss

  the weather hadn’t dreamt.

  Hero mine the beloved,

  cried snowflakes, cried the moons

  of unknown planets, cried the thorns

  in his garland, the nails bashed

  through his bones, the spikes of dry grass

  on the hillside, dotted with water

  and with blood—real tears,

  and not a trick of rain-light

  blinked and blurred onto a tree

  so that the tree seems wound

  in gold. It was not wound

  in gold or rain but in a rapture

  of salt, the wood splintering

  as he splintered when he wept

  over Lazarus, over Jerusalem,

  until his sorrow became his action,

  his grief his victory—

  until his tears became a rupture

  in nature, all creation

  discipled to his suffering

  on the gilded gallows-tree,

  the wood which broke beneath the weight

  of love, though it had no ears to hear

  him cry out, and no eyes to see.

  THE GIANTS’ SWORD MELTS

  Beowulf, 1605–1617

  If all metal once were water,

  if all water once could cut the skin—

  if the edge could withstand the blood,

  could turn aside its face,

  could still ask, now can you guess my name?,

  would it ask it in the giants’ tongue?

  Or in the tongue of ice, of layers

  of glaciers melted to a silver point,

  a blade of barrow-light, a drop

  of sun that once shone on a tale

  of men as tall as trees? And like trees

  they towered terribly, like trees

  they stretched to scathe the sky,

  this sky of scalding waves.

  Who put you there, ice-brand

  heavy as a mother’s tongue

  when she has lost her son?

  Who scratched a flood onto your hilt?

  Who committed to your melted steel

  a spell, a tale terrific strange

  in runes that once were songs,

  the singers’ voices fetters of frost,

  the script not the real story,

  the real story water-bands loosening, lost?

  GOLD LEAF

  the Gospel Book of Otto III, ca. 10th century

  Shines forth from the vellum this film of sun,

  the precious metal pounded thick as air,

  then bound to the page with gesso or with glair—

  more than one hundred leaves of gold from one

  ducat. Otto, on the gold-leaf throne

  which he commissioned—servant of Christ, ruler

  of the world—surveys his gilded empire,

  and the hand of God adjusts his crown.

  O Christ, how I have loved you, with my heart shut

  like an emperor’s fist or a golden door,

  a Bible with its pages locked up tight.

  In my poverty I sought a poor God to adore,

  a love I could buy with my widow’s mite.

  But this is not a Bible for the poor.

  CENTO: NATURAL THEOLOGY

  Hildegard of Bingen, 12th century

  Partly like the sun and partly like the air,

  the earth—just like a body

  if it had no bones. As if by veins

  it is held together so it does not crumble.

  Like a lamb sucking milk, the plants

  suck up the green; place the emerald

  in their mouth and the spirit will revive,

  a fire of burning mountains

  which is difficult to put out,

  like the thunder’s eye. It cannot be caught.

  It ministers to those who bear it,

  coming from the mystery of God

  like limestone from stone, one drop

  of dew found on clean grass. All its matter

  is from the fresh greenness of the air,

  the sharpness of the water, flame

  in the heavens. God does not wish to cure it.

  REGIONALISM

  People mock the South wherever I pass through.

  It’s so racist, so backward, so NASCAR.

  I don’t hate it, but they all do.

  As if they themselves marched out in blue,

  they’re still us-themming it about the Civil War,

  mocking the South, wherever it is (they’ve never passed through).

  It’s a formless humid place with bad food (except for BBQ)—

  the grits, slick boiled peanuts, sweet tea thick as tar.

  I don’t hate it, but they all do,

  though they love Otis Redding, Johnny Cash, the B-52s.

  The rest of it can go ahead and char.

  People mock my Southern mouth wherever I pass through,

  my every “might could have” and “fixin’ to,”

  my flattened vowels that make “fire” into “far.”

  I don’t hate how I talk, where I’m from, but they all do

  their best to make me. It’s their last yahoo

  in a yahooing world of smear, slur, and mar.

  People mock the South, its past. They’re never through.

  I’m damned if I don’t hate it, and damned if I do.

  SCRIPTORIUM

  Before the stepwork and the fretwork,

  before the first wet spiral leaves the brush,

  before the plucking of the geese’s quills,

  before the breaking of a thousand leads,

  before the curving limbs and wings

  of hounds, cats, and cormorants

  knot into letters, before the letters knot

  into the Word, Eadfrith ventures from his cell,

  reed basket on his arm, past Cuth
bert’s grave,

  past the stockyard where the calves’ cries bell,

  and their blood illuminates the dirt as ink

  on vellum, across the glens and woods

  to gather woad and lichens, to the shores

  to gather shells. The earth, not the cell,

  is his scriptorium, where he might see

  the interlace of branch and twig and leaf;

  how green bleeds brown when fields are plowed;

  how green banks blue where grass gives way to sea;

  how blue twists into white in swirling lines

  purling through the water and the sky.

  Before the skinning of a hundred calves,

  before the stretching and the scraping of their hides,

  before the boiling vinegar, the toasting lead,

  the bubbling orpiment and verdigris,

  before the glair cracks from the egg,

  before the monk perfects his recipe

  (egg white, oak-gall, iron salt, mixed

  in a tree-stump, some speculate)

  to make the pigments glorious to the Lord,

  before Eadfrith’s fingers are permanently stained

  the colors of his world—crimson, emerald,

  cerulean, gold—outside the monastery walls,

  in the village, with its brown hounds

  spooking yellow cats stalking green-black birds,

  on the purple-bitten lips of peasants

  his gospel’s corruption already sings forth

  in vermilion ink, firebrands on a red calf’s hide—

  though he’ll be dead before the Vikings sail,

  and two centuries of men and wars

  will pass before his successor Aldred

  pierces Eadfrith’s text with thorn,

  ash, and all the other angled letters

  of his gloss. Laced between the lines of Latin,

 

‹ Prev