Illuminating Manuscripts

ILLUMINATING MANUSCRIPTS / Glover Davis Like unicorn and dragon eagle soon may be an ornate symbol in a book. Hung from a column, wings will be a rune whose twisted lines, though smeared with carbon, hook light swimming potencies in channels shook by hand through leaves which raise a cottonwood— first letter in a lost genetic code. So when a clavicle began to rise with every gust from panes whose leaves and glass spilled through the seething curtains taped with gauze, my riffling fingers were like blades of grass against the place where dreaming feathers mass. The bulging skin implied with a wing of stone a sculptor's chisle loosened from the bone. Red cloth would scarve the cries of predators; the throbbing wound the world had come to be. But sudden blasts unbolted the french doors. Lightning illuminated a struck tree. Brocaded branches carved the roiling sky with capitals metallic leaves efface by constant spill of pieces cut like lace. The manuscript of leaves contained no reasons for an eagle's tumbling to the floor, his white hood daubed by spotting fingers red as suns. He had one eye, and when I spread the tight coil of a wing, the eye dusted with light spasmodically pulsed, as though the light were breath melted from mirrors just before his death. I knew I must not let the eagle die. I knew his powers—transcribed to letters spelt in loops and swirls across a brightening sky— 178 · The Missouri Review were trails of chalk the wind and hot sun melt. A blackened eye was gushing as I knelt and pressed the rigid bundle to my chest, hoping a heart would beat through either breast. Glover Davis The Missouri Review · 179 ...