It’s gone now, buried deep in a midden
or swept down the river: ballracks
and cheek, tympan and gallows, frisket
and forestay: Johannes’ design of 1440.
And the coffin, the box where blackened
type sat, over which he’d lay the platen
to press ink on the vellum, paper made
from the skin of a kid or a lamb softened
in a bath of lime, stretched over a frame
and scraped with a lunellum, a crescent-
shaped blade that removes hair and flesh,
lunellum, yes, from luna, the moon—
can you imagine this? The membrane
of young animals, the moon in someone’s
hand, how deft the skill, thin the vellum,
damp the carbon as a printed page was born.
The allure of our ancestors, right? They had
their day. Me, I’m all toner and cartridge,
gantry and sheet feeder, could do thirty pages
a minute on a good day. And oh, I had many.
I could join the ancients now, the tide rises so
high, but I cling to this rock, wonder about
my stories and letters now off in the world.
Patient as my forebears, I wait for a word.
~
Lorri Neilsen Glenn is the author and contributing editor of several collections of
poetry, scholarly work and creative nonfiction, including Following the River: Traces of
Red River Women (Wolsak and Wynn) and The Old Moon in Her Arms: Women
I Have Known and Been (Nimbus). Halifax’s first Métis Poet Laureate, she lives and
works in Mi’kma’ki.
♦
Photo credit: Carol Bruneau
The Litter I See Project 