The medium is magical: a mesh mould lifted
old clothes, sails and rope fibres, an organic jumble
sinewed with chain and laid lines, then coated
with glue from boiled bones, to make off-white paper
that will take ink tannins. It’s a strong enough sizing
to carry still the marks from a dead bird’s feather
– a mortuary block and a figure half-rising,
Mantegna’s unnerving ‘Man on a Stone Slab’:
Lazarus perhaps, waking from a dead sleep, his bulk
borne on his left arm; his sheet’s ridges form
a foreshortened panorama. Gazing
amongst ghosts of pages and a crowd’s awkward shuffle
for perspective in the museum’s old Reading Room,
I feel my foot, as though willing a high-jump, lifting.