Spoken by someone who writes, or perhaps who is written, "Scribal" is a short poem about the odd position of a voice that lives on the page. The speaker begins with a wish to move past their own limits: "to go beyond my going." Then comes a strange, slightly unsettling idea, that looking at something might make it look back, as if the world could answer a glance with a blow.
The central line, "I am ink but not a pen," suggests the speaker is made of the material of writing without being the one who controls it. Someone else seems to hold the pen, or no one does. The closing lines place the speaker's origin in "a book," which is called "a little hell." That could mean the book is a place of confinement, or that making words is painful and consuming.
The mood is tense and uneasy, but also compact and intriguing. The poem leaves a lot unsaid, so the sense of being trapped inside language, and longing to get out, comes mostly from what the images hint at.