lead stayed
core, its power like a uranium rod,
potential as prayer that drives plea and direction,
drawn between blunt and point with use and sharpening.
I imagined it pocketed, taken North in parallel
to the masons’ track, plumb-line from Durham to Orkney
to work the same liverish stone into cathedrals.
My voyage was rather North-west, out of Oban,
the pencil stowed away in a wax jacket pocket
to copy Gaelic into a notebook, seeking
‘cathedral’ among words for ‘midge’ and ‘Indian takeaway’.
Here Lyeth Ye Bodys
The dead have their own quarter, ghost space
outside old walls that are no longer there;
moraine of names, gathered, eroded, sometimes
just a stump; brief essays in anonymity.
Here Lyeth Ye Bodys; identities planed down
by weather, and some black slates set flat
as steppings for a clapper bridge, as sentry;
one’s stapled to the wall, moonscape in sandstone.
Most are Sacred to the Memory of … yet often
flaked to prepositions, or a subtracted date.
One’s cracked like a commandment tablet, a weed
arguing through the fissure. Moss fuzzes carving.
Some still shout in block capitals. Tiered marble castles,
fortifies THE EARTHLY REMAINS OF THE HONORABLE
SAMUEL WALDEGRAVE DD … FELL ASLEEP IN JESUS
1869. Remember those who have rule over you.
A brief space for so many passing, ruled
over by patched buttresses that prop the wall,
a black fence spiked to an armoury, a beech
hedge rustling like page-turning cassocked choristers.
One’s modest, a sandstone plinth with inset slate,
almost outside cathedral grounds, a body’s
length from the cobbled street: Robert Anderson
The Cumbrian Bard, poet; saluted on the edge of things.
Gargoyles
The Guide’s brief mention of grotesque, a photograph
more ink blot than detail, smudge than features,
‘in the corbel table supporting the nave parapet’.
Parable by absence; the sceptic’s version
of church history. Somewhere in the dark
a plague face, twist of features into pain,
caricature theology, a reversed healing,
some mason taking the piss with a dean’s features.
Same loss or sadness or incompleteness
followed the day conference on war and child soldiers,
through the distribution of clay, shade of a suntan.
The face she made, with recesses for eyes and nose,
lop-sided twist of smile, tendency to topple,
could form a gargoyle in our wounded century.
Entrances
That line between three worlds, past, present, future,
thins over threshold; at the breath of a door,
footsteps sharpened on stone, a gasp of stars
that fill the roof, suggest a high perspective,
that builds infinity out of the perpendicular.
Each entering brings and takes. A photo-ticket
opens the electronic apertures to icons
on thumbnail sim-cards. Once journal note or sketch
had to contain all memories and perceptions,
a passing bonnet, cliffed walls; prayerful stillness.
Still somewhere to reach out; print words on silence,
make something out of apparent nothingness,
that mental mime where bowed heads conjure prayer,
that silent mail where cards are left by candles
posted to holiness, somewhere. This space
allowing those seeking to frame their own responses:
photographer’s flash creating instant diaries,
a sanctuary pause inside the scurrying world;
some recognition, through light or space or echo
of something further, someone beckoning.
Runes
Following a flashlight, hoovering through the dark,
he found runes; twiggery, a woven stick fence,
predominantly verticals, and the odd curve
like a glance of sky between twin tower blocks,
a signed boast of sparse literacy at that time:
Dolfin wrote these runes on this stone.
Questions follow, as always when a light’s switched off,
when anyone goes down from a high discovery:
Why did this man see need to sign the cathedral?
Why do the strokes grow longer with each rune?
Did confidence master suspicion of discovery?
Why the imperative to leave a name?
And why did the later schoolboys who made their marks
at choir practice need to bring their knives?
Thomas Pattinson, living at the sign of The Bush,
Robert Horsley, probably a butcher’s boy.
Clues scribbled on scraps from eighteenth-century text books,
exercises, drawings, class-lists, found
in a fireplace unblocked two centuries later
continued that quiet ministry of cleaning, and disclosure.
Poets’ Corner
Nicholson stands sentry, head and shoulders
above us as we enter, overlooking those
who do not glance up to spot him in recess,
as hacked black, out of coal; cold stare and muttonchops.
Lower, his companion’s laid out in briefer words
than those he gathered in dialect: Robert Anderson,
the Cumbrian Bard, profiled in white marble.
Three footsteps in, floor flutters as the door opens,
a