for Jack Johnson, my linotype operator, newspaper jack of all trades Grandfather who worked for his father's newspaper in Prescott, Arkansas and who died at age 29
I too like Gutenberg longed to hammer words into gold
into gold, saffron, the scarlet, violet of maples leaved and
leaving,
to polish the mirrors into flight reflectng the light of the
saints and souvenirs, chimerical albums
to leave even so faint traces of my own existence here
perhaps one pearllike tear admonishing not the one flower in
a wilderness pressed not into a book
one modest blue stone or atomies
bearing like amber the slightest wavering of the fern
and to enamel lightly, sprightly on the earth the memory of
clouds in a time of drought
seeking to win, where yet, I only begin
and yet I dream it so
the moveable type of wings
the typography anointed
in all the colours of the sun to run the prism through
the handiwork of the mourning Dove on such a loom
to publish to the air only what I dare
and to let God pick up as a fond child
the somewhat phoenix ashes, and renew
the tattered heraldry
of what remained to do
the wild rose music left unscored
and yet it is enough for me and you
itinerant scribes no longer inscribing
I heard him almost whisper with a goldsmith's yearning
born out of his time
to set the type
illuminated come what may in after Mays
compositor at cost whatever we have lost
or to vanish with the missing page
posterity cannot find.
mary angela douglas 3 october 2022;21 february 2023
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