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Anne Crowe

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Imagining the Library

after Michelangelos’ plan for the Laurentian Small Library

Red-brown ink, rusted like blood:
this library within a library, walled and enclosed,
is worked like a blunt elbow
beautifully darned.

Designed to be small and secret,
to house the most precious books;
the image persists like knotwork,
a maze you might enter at dusk
led by the scent of box and clove-pinks,
calling the name of a cat you once had as a child.

Now that you’re lost among quicksets
savour the word pleasaunce on your tongue,
following the names of plants down to their roots;
feeling for bistort and catnip,
houndstongue, lungwort, feverfew.

The body was where he started from.
Beside the plan in a small, clear hand
he gives the scale: a thumb-joint’s length
to represent one bracio.
Picture him pacing, stretching out both his arms
to measure fathoms of air; imagining
for a curving wall’s recess
that hollow below the collar-bone
where languid Adam’s arm travels towards
a galvanic meeting of finger-tips.

But now, sit on the round stone bench, here
where no-one ever sat before;
and while you read
it will come to you in a murmur of leaves
that the library was never built
until this moment.

 

bracia (Italian, now braccio): an arm; yard, ell; flight of steps

Page(s) 38

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