In Autumn I Dream Of Gutenberg (Revised) Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

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