The Composing Room

By Greg Delanty

I still see those men haphazardly standing

around the comps’ floor, mostly silent,

lost in their latest urgent jobs,

looking up and down as if nodding yes

from what they call their composers’ sticks

as they set inverse words and lines

of each page that could be taken for

Greek scripture, declaring:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word

was made cold type and the Word was

coldness, darkness, shiny greyness

and light—and the Word dwelt amongst us.

*

Oh, I know these men would laugh this off.

They’d say, if they simply didn’t throw

their eyes to heaven, that they were just ordinary

characters trying to keep the devil from the door,

and with luck have enough left over each week

to back a few nags, and go for a few jars.

But they can’t say anything or set anything now.

They are scattered from that place that’s not

the same any more and many have left

any place we know of in this life,

calling to mind the old names for printing:

The Mysterious Craft or simply The Mystery.

*

I set them up in another city, another country

that’s as far away in distance

from that city as it’s far in time.

But they are still composing,

cracking the odd joke above

their sticks and galleys on some floor

of some building that is eternally busy

inside me even when I’ve forgotten

that I’ve forgotten them; forgetting

the world behind the word—

every time I read the word world I wonder

is it a typo and should I delete the l.

*

Now again I hanker to know the quality

of each letter: the weight, the texture, the smell,

the shiny new type, the ink-dark shades of old,

the different types of type, the various sizes

within the same font, the measures in ems,

picas, points and units. I’d set the words up,

making something out of all this

that stays standing—all set as masterly

as the words those men set that reveal

something of the mystery behind

and within these letters and the wonder and

the darkness, but with the lightest touch.

*

And the umpteen ways things can foul up

are beyond telling. Maybe the type is off,

or the typesetter may not be up

to the work, if only out of a hangover

setting an ! where there should be a ?

or a b where there should be a d,

or miss aspace or a line or dingbat.

And the proofreaders don't catch the error,

passing the copy on as clean, or the make-up man

fouls the assembly page, or the stoneman errs

as he fastens the page of cold type and furniture

with the chase, turning the quoin’s key.

*

Not to speak of the evil eye cast by

fellow composers ready

to knock the words of others, or the bosses

writing on the composition: Kill.

Old Shades, keep my words from such eyes

and fretting about that pied world and let me go

on regardless. And even if I foul up and the stewards

are right to set Kill on my last page and my words

are distributed and thrown in the hellbox,

the real achievement will be that I tried to set

the words right; that I did it with much labor

and not without a font of love. But that said,

*

grant me the skill to free the leaden words

from the words I set, undo their awkwardness,

the weight of each letter of each word

so that the words disappear, fall away

or are forgotten and what remains is the metal

of feeling and thought behind

and beyond the cast of words

dissolving in their own ink wash.

Within this solution we find ourselves,

meeting only here, through The Mystery,

but relieved nonetheless to meet, if only

behind the characters of one fly-boy’s words.

Copyright Credit: Greg Delanty, "The Composing Room" from Selected Delanty. Copyright © 2017 by Greg Delanty. Reprinted by permission of Un-Gyve Press.