to roof the psalms, graffiti, translating runes.
You remember those sitting by phones, waiting for a story.
Close
Always surprised by gulls that call this city
awake, or scratch the morning with sharpened shrieks
that stretch over holy towers and overlapped lorries
offloading in delivery bays. Eternity’s
still in the Close. A single cyclist sidles
shyly from Morning Prayer, unchains his bike;
a trio of schoolboys, uniforms trimmed to trend,
gossip by with identical bags, as advertised.
The copper beech alters its colour secretly
in slowly turning light; lichens become
green again in sun’s reach, first thrush rehearses
his song, beyond organ practice muffled by sandstone.
Those passing stroll, outlined by sunlight, as
sound seeps through from the city’s undertow.
Devotions could come outside this spotlit morning,
a sort of prayer cast into the shape of birdsong:
with reference to the gargoyles’ twisted suffering,
rattle of a train that slows down after distance,
those passing with their needs, baggage, potential;
how shadow is moved by light, occasional voices
discussing the day ahead, nurse and dog-walker,
those listening in through headphones, the bowed heads
furrowing into busyness, and that capacity
for all prayer to surprise: sudden oystercatchers.
Akeland
I found the pencil, lost out in the Close,
lime stripe as straight as mown cathedral lawn,
sharpened to the point where its given Cumbrian name
had been reduced to ‘akeland’. Its 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
