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Leza Lowitz

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Saint Jerome in his Study

(after the etching by Albrecht Dürer)

for Azby Brown


Among the men at Tokyo Station
you’re the purest child of nature
looking out for self among the crowds
you’re the man who still believes in boyhood
I’m the one who thinks some have no selves.
Perhaps it’s me I speak of
the only woman in the darkwood bar
at the tawdry Station Hotel
who lives to lose herself
among the stark-suited men drinking
green bottles of Grolsch
smoking Tareytons in cork-tipped breaths
rescued from a more innocent age
we walk the red-rug’d halls
reach the etchings of the papyrus-eating men
lips repentant, dry with the pain of craftsman’s bitter paste
paradise of lost words never far behind
the nets we cast so cunningly across ourselves
Adam and Eve at the Tree of Knowledge
cat and stubborn mouse at their turned-out toes
Saint Jerome in his darkwood study
bent over a manuscript in refracted light
drapery weaving knowledge from its brightened folds
hourglass behind him
and what’s that mysterious book of days
beneath the architect’s beams and hanging gourd?
what words did he pore over then
and what silences draw us to him now
in the atrium of the station
men coming and going
with the intensity of scholars
searching out
all the great forbidden books.

 

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