Transom Issue 5: Sarah Howe Poem by Sarah Howe

Take
that pet of medieval didacts, the manicule, or little hand: fringe-dweller of
early manuscripts, whose jotted, peripheral fists, sprung with an admonitory digit
lace the tanned margins of our most cankered and flame-buckled books - a fervid
injunction to look. Picture them: speckled palely
at the page edge, their flare of crumbs trailing in
to the tangled inky forest of a spreadeagled folio
you've just heaved off the shelves. Now follow
their frail pointers as if you yourself - stooped
to track this scribe's oddly curling ascenders -
might be thrown back to the moment of their
still-wet penning & the cloister's draughty
aisle - you leaning in at the old monk's
shoulder & attending to that crooked
gesture: grasp his hand across the
ages' gutter - its urgent here