Spine and Sinew

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a book opening — the specific crack of old glue and thread)
Codicology. Not what the book says. What the book IS.

[Verse 1]
Everybody wants the text. Everybody wants the words.
He wants the sewing. He wants the thread and the needle holes,
the pricking marks down the margin where somebody ruled the lines,
the parchment with the follicle pattern still faintly showing through,
which tells him it was a calf, and roughly how old the calf was,
and therefore what a monastery could afford that year.

[Chorus]
Spine and sinew. Gut thread and oak board.
The book as an animal that was turned into a machine
for carrying somebody's voice past the end of their body.
He loves it the way you love a boat, or a good chair.
Spine and sinew. He can smell the century.
Somebody studies this. Somebody had to.

[Verse 2]
There's a hair in the gutter of a psalter from 1140
and it is the scribe's, or the calf's, or a reader's from 1600,
and he will not know which, and he thinks about it anyway.
There's a wax drip. There's a thumb-shine where a hand rested
in the same place, on the same page, for two hundred years of hands.
The book has a wear pattern. The wear pattern is a biography.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And a text can be copied. A text survives being copied.
But the OBJECT can't — the thread, the fold, the sewing station,
the moment somebody's knife slipped and they carried on anyway.
Digitise it all you like, you get the words and lose the calf.
He is the only person in the room mourning the calf.
That is a strange way to spend a life, and he's not sorry.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the book closes)
Careful.
Both hands. Always both hands.