Academic dreams . . .

and a memory of a world that seems to be vanishing

Amid yesterday’s news of the awful Canvas hack that’s making life hell just now for thousands of college teachers and millions of students, I recall that, once upon a time, I wanted to be a teacher at the college level. The poem below arose from my preparation for that life. I was probably better off never getting an academic job, but there are moments of that preparation, like this one, that shine brightly in memory.

Hand

On a long oak table in a formal room
in Rare Books, on the library’s seventh floor,
is the fifteenth-century manuscript—Middle English—
from which I mean to wring a dissertation.
The work is verse, a church-year’s worth of sermons
probably copied by an earnest monk.
The librarian, anxious for this precious object
left to my handling, offers me a bookweight.
I settle into the captain’s chair and the task.

These first steps are detective work, forensics.
Hand: Anglicana; Secretary features.
Materials: paper. Visible watermarks.
A lot of Northern spellings. I warm to this,
matter and form, but I’m especially held
by matter, tangibles: the ink, the paper.
Though faded, the pen strokes have the ebb and flow
of a bending quill tip in a moving hand.
The heavy paper still shows peaks and troughs
that speak to the moving pen. My own right hand,
knows pens and writing, and it feels these moves,
knows in its bones another hand was here.

I move on steadily, noting organization,
stories, verse forms, language variants,
marginal scribbles. I don’t know how long
I’ve worked like this when I come to the colophon,
the little end note that the scribe has left.
The words are, Pray for him that made this book.

It hits like a stone: Handwritten words on paper,
like any scrawl on spiral-bound, ripped out
and passed across the classroom, any note
on an envelope’s back, left on the kitchen table,
and in my cradle-Catholic head, the prayer
has said itself before the doubt spoke up.

It’s only later, as I walk toward home,
that I picture a grave—somewhere near Hull, I think—
and wonder how long the bones of a hand would last.

(first published in Strong Verse, in the book Mid Evil)