I have about an hour to write or not write
a poem about the day I may or may not
have encountered you at the Chester Beatty Library.
Encountered is perhaps too strong a word.
Brushed shoulders with, held a door for,
or vice versa,observed a middle aged man,
possibly making notes with a lead pencil
in a pocket sized notebook-spiral or hardback
perhaps even moleskine with magnetic close and pen loop
and maybe a bookmark ribbon or two,
as you stood in that dim lit display of Leonardo's Codex Leicester,
touching screen to turn a page,sepia ink on linen, marvelling like me
at his busy margins, as you put it later,
his twenty-six experiments of placing objects in water,
or his sketches of bridges and bubbles and the fall of a drop of water.
You wouldn't have noticed me
for I was on a mission for facts, facts, facts.
But you, poised over the Codex, your head a whirlpool of possibility,
a poet in full flung fantasy, imagining Leonardo-
"his marvellous head resting in his hands,
wondering if water might exist on the moon."*
How could I have missed that?
Quote from Billy Collins poem Dublin in his book Whale Day and other poems
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Whale-Day-Billy-Collins/dp/0399589759
I wrote an article for Ireland's Own on Codex Leicester- August ,2007, Vol 5,093
