Aristotle in the Middle Ages

They came from everywhere to that long table
in the Middle Ages.
It was cold in there, in damp Toledo
in the room where Bishop Raymond and the others
picked their way through tomes,
so thick with dust motes,
candles burning down the darkest time.

They could not believe their dizzy luck.
De Anima in Arabic was theirs,
his animation of the hard, true world
the soul inhabits, like their feet in socks.
The nature of the natural was given,
in a dozen works that God himself
could understand as what he really meant.

Having made their way down nights
through untold pages, with their quills alight,
they all went out into the little streets
to feed on sausages like fat red fingers
and to drink their health:
the world was theirs again to witness,
walk on, wake in, feed and feel.

Jay Parini
The Kenyon Review
New Series, Volume XXVIII Number 3
Summer 2006

Copyright © 2006 by The Kenyon Review
Authors hold the rights to their individual works.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

REMEMBER TO SUPPORT POETRY DAILY'S GENEROUS SPONSORS... Sponsor PD!