DANIEL BOURNE
THE PRINTER’S TALE
for
Paul Christianson
I. Prologue
Always one traveller is silent, or
the story gets told another way, the words carried
in the basket of the gardener pacing
just beyond the edge of the fire-light, beyond
the smell of this strange language being broken
like coarse, mealy bread. His first
labors of the season—to name the color of the mud,
to arrange the tentative green
iambics of ivy—the spade blade punctuating
the silence.
II. Incunabula
In the cradle,
there is never silence.
The child stirs, learns
that its tongue
is a boat going to the far island,
a hedgerow
hiding advancing armies on horseback, each horse
like a panel of a tapestry, the invasion
woven not just from battle but its aftermath,
the need for two languages
to share a common fence line, to buy a mule.
Or marry.
III. Colophon
This is where
the eye gets sprouted, the mind nods
at the end of its long, slender stalk. Every book
contains a few overlooked weeds.
When each row of type was planted
some seeds fell at the printer’s feet.
Afterwards, the ink revealing
the rivers in his hands,
he walked through whatever town he walked through, unbothered
that each stone
still retained
its own local spelling.
