THE LIBRARY · THE VALE

The Marginal Hand

An imperial toll-and-tribute roll, dry as dust, down whose margin a much later reader has argued with the record in a cramped, angry hand — and whose last note, beside a column tallying what the Vale has lost year on year, is three words pointing the wrong way: look not down.

[margins of an old Writ tribute-roll; the record is imperial, the marginal hand centuries younger] [beside a list of failed mines] — they write it down as if the ground grew poor by its own idleness. The ground did not close these. Something above the ground took the strength OUT of them. Read the years: it worsens from the SKY down, not the deep up. [beside the falling grain-tithe] — again. Blamed on the weather, the soil, the god's absence. But absence does not DRAIN. A dead thing does not keep taking. Whatever is doing this is not dead and is not below. [beside the final tally, the accumulated loss of four centuries] — I have added the losses the way the clerks never do, all together, all the years. It is not a decline. It is a WITHDRAWAL, steady, patient, from one direction. Stop looking into the barrows for it. Look not down. Look UP. — [here the hand stops; the ink of the last word is smeared, as if the writer was interrupted, or thought better of it, or was made to]

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