‘Rare Books’: A Poem by Mary Jane Myers

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Rare Books

—Magdalen College, Oxford, November 1991

From London, westward ho, and slantwise north,
I journey into Oxfordshire and see,
through outsize windows on the Stagecoach bus,
green meadows framed by thick-set hawthorn hedgerows,
the spreading canopies of great-trunked oaks,
fat-uddered cows serenely foraging,
joy-barking collies chasing squirrels and hares.
The olden life of England happens here.

I’ve come now to the citadel of Magdalen,
Jurassic limestone Augustinian cloister,
omphalos of the Greek and Latin classics.
Barbarians assail its ivied walls,
eviscerating Greats; yet still the dons
resuscitate its belletristic heart:
luminous logos—Plato, Aristotle;
mystical mythos—Homer, Ovid, Dante.

I visit Paul, my academic friend
credentialed in the Ivy League (myself,
a timid tagalong); we are invited
to High Table, feasting on rare beef.
The group around me chuckles at a pun
from Sappho’s Fragment One, and then guffaws
about black-figure satyrs on an Attic krater.
Paul smiles through eyes myopic and bemused.

The dinner ends. The gracious president
proposes that we view their rarest books.
He guides us through a maze of corridors,
and upstairs to a massive oaken door.
He turns the lock with an immense iron key,
flicks on a wall switch: dim uncertain light.
Like Carter when his torch illuminated
the boy-king’s tomb, I gasp.
the boy-king’s tomb, I gasp.  Astounding things!

Sanctum sanctorum, oaken shelves arrayed
with volumes bound in old Morocco leather,
parquet floor to vaulted ribbed stone ceiling.
I have imagined fabled treasure troves:
the library of imperial Byzantium,
Augustine’s writings saved from Vandal hordes,
medieval psalters stored in monasteries.
And now this room: the very stuff of dreams.

Removing a vintage tome, he beckons me
to take it in my hands. I hesitate.
Might not my fingers soil the antique binding?
Trembling, I hold the book, then open it.
I contemplate the curious frontispiece:
engraving framed in knotty filigree,
title in Latin on the facing page,
a date in Roman numerals: 1612.

I pass it back to him, peruse the shelves.
An author: T.E. Lawrence. I inquire
if that’s the famous helper of the Arabs.
Oh yes! This is his first Mideastern journal.
We sponsored him, a Senior Demyship,
he went to Syria. The rest is epic.
I turn the pages, stare at penciled scribblings,
nonsensical or sense I cannot tell.

How strange the wanderings of documents,
the random accidents of preservation.
Both sacred and profane discoveries
are made by genius minds throughout the ages,
preserved in written form; forgotten, lost,
then found again. Through sheer fluke they survive,
the chine of science and philosophy,
a storied past conversing with our present.

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Mary Jane Myers resides in Springfield, Illinois. She is a retired JD/CPA tax specialist. Her debut short story collection Curious Affairs was published by Paul Dry Books in 2018.