1. The alphabet
This is his school in Mainz,
where he learns to read and write Latin,
to parse his local dialect,
to cipher in the Arabic manner
and endure the Carmelite masters,
where perhaps he listens on a long afternoon
to the pulsing of his vitals,
to lore of the waiting neighborhoods,
nuances of the doorways, the clouds,
of his mother’s sigh,
himself bearing his shadow everywhere.
2. The punch, the die, the mold
These are the alleys, the wharves, the marketplace
where the roaming youth encounters enterprise
among the guilds of prideful craftsmen,
particularly the coin-makers at the Mint,
where his father and uncle are honorary overseers,
where it may be that rumors come in on the wind
of the shapes and tones of things,
that dark fables stir in his reveries
of the right to enter anywhere,
of things unseen that nonetheless exist,
of games on precarious fields.
3. The impasse
These are the familial rooms where, at twenty-five,
with an upper-class education and aspiration,
he confronts his disheartening prospects,
the city in political turmoil, fearful of the plague,
his mother’s lowly origins denying him royal favor,
whose expectations surely wake in the night
to entreaties of his hormones,
to intuitions of bright sun on his gardens,
of vital excursions over the mountains,
of the present vanishing into autumn, into spring,
his worth eking itself away.
4. The opportunity
Here is the profusion of pigs and carriages,
drainage ditches and sandstone spires
through which he passes in an urgent fantasy
of certain implements and skills in familiar use
that in some as yet ambiguous way are his calling,
who just might, randomly, fleetingly,
there in the bewilderment of the day,
in the silence between the words,
receive intimations of his undermind, his intent,
there, where the swallows whirl against the sky,
where the troubles come from.
5. The form, the press, the paper, the ink
This is Strasbourg, two days up the Rhine,
where he retreats, and where for ten years
he schemes and borrows and contrives
to sustain a workshop in which, day by day,
he invents printing with movable type,
where work, no doubt, instructs him in its graces,
in its dailiness, its perversities,
in the profit of long staring,
of hindrance and accident,
where he finds himself at risk like a man,
alone in the human condition.
6. The consummation
Now he is back at his old home in Mainz,
in his fifties, harried by debt and lesser work,
who, nonetheless, acquires a verified text,
formatting plans, sufficient paper and type
to produce some hundred and eighty Bibles,
of which he well may say they are what they are,
knowing, as others will, that they are genuine,
are blemished, are prodigious, are compromised
by faltering ingenuity and courage,
have left irremediable gaps in his life
and a passion to begin anew.
7. The eventuality
These are the hearing rooms and imperilled streets
where, almost immediately upon his apparent victory,
his principal creditor seizes his publishing assets,
where he is caught up in ecclesiastical hostilities,
is divested of his house and banned from the city,
who, neither disputing justice nor soliciting mercy,
conceivably announces to his stack of belongings,
to his viscera, his solitude,
that there are yet right choices to be made,
yet alternatives for the human effort,
yet answers to the stars and the inimical signs.
8. The resolution
This is the hamlet Eltville, where he repairs
to live among relatives and work modestly
at the trade which now spreads across Europe,
vastly enabling the Reformation and the Renaissance,
sustained at last by a pension from the archbishop,
who almost certainly knows an old man’s fears,
an exile farther than any province,
reflects with his father’s memory on the apple crop,
the feather of a crane floating on a puddle,
discarded moments, obscure commotions,
the otherness of the women.
