Aristotle in the Middle Ages

They came from everywhere to that long table

in the Middle Ages.

It was cold in damp Toledo

in the room where Bishop Raymond and the others

picked their way through tomes

now 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.