"The Book Scorpion" by Aldous Asterion
Added 2023-01-09 12:58:08 +0000 UTCMan can embody truth but he cannot know it.—Yeats
I. Ex Libris
As if gazing down a corridor, observe
The great replete shelves repeat themselves
(as, I’m sure, their contents do) and note
How no red thread describes the arcane ark,
As if a minotaur would leap ex libris;
The Dewey-decimal editions of
The New Jerusalem might here be held,
But by my unerudite blunt mind belied:
O belated ghost, get lost in the gallery.
II. Ignis Fatuus
There is not world enough, not time to serve.
Might I inscribe one letter, line, or verse
Of worth to paste up on a shelf to wait
And while and waste until some hearer harks
Its tiny ticks inside the cosmic index
(I strain to lay that line iambically)—
One thought that thinking more could not reverse?
No rabbi here to relate, no priest to bless,
Mere reader, maudlin creature, mute witness.
III. Pseudoscorpionida
The pseudoscorpion, though small, deserves
Our notice here as metaphor. It was,
Like logic, first described by Aristotle.
Like other patrons, it may have two eyes,
Or four, or none. It crawls across the scrawls,
It cannot scry, it has no sting, it eats
The mites that eat the books it thus preserves:
Look what Great Work the bug accomplishes
Along the margins, in between the lines.
