Behind
the barn, half-barn-size and half-seen
between
yew crops, it stands low in its graves.
Stone cherubs, blind with time’s gangrene,
struggle
to feed to bones earth still depraves
with nervous roots and slimes
the Hampshire scene, the well-heeled lane
contenting beefy families still.
Over
the cringing dead behind the times:
Up
Marden church—the charged and empty Will.
The
dead behind you, enter in and be
chilled
by the frugal origin of air,
encounter an ancient poverty
that
cannot impress, not even self-aware,
just nondescript. The pews
are scruffy, but for two or three
minutes now are comfort enough,
while
a winter hiker scrapes mud from his shoes,
to
savour the absence in of mind and love.
Bells
in the clapboard tower have inspired
a
trickle across the centuries from the race
of cowman and navy man retired
to
kneel in this bare, undistinguished place.
Though why they trod so far
is odd, unless some nothing called
to tell how proto-reason planned
a
ball of mud and flame near a faint star
to
howl through space, become a fibrous gland
as
pain took root. The clog of the bright share
gravels
the Will, whose dereliction wrecks
the midshipman malaria
licked
far from home. The strident nerves make, flex
of cruel, self-wounding arms,
the bare Will lacerate and grow
in ever-changing glamour. Puce
quarrels
of wood, glissando scarp, fat farms,
beget
in the tiny soul moods less obtuse—
for
whom no priest can come now on his calls.
The
sleek irrelevant hands will not annoy
with pan the uncollected falls
of
dust behind the font. Stiff chains deploy
four candelabra, slight
convex serrated squares of brass
like eggshell Frankish crowns, askew
from
whitewashed beams. From these have come the light,
gleams
in the emptiness, gleams mean and few.
This
is the very first place. Here retire
when
you have switched synapses in the mind
and gauged the fare of flame and mire.
This
is where life starts, empty-handed, blind,
different from us, a snake
of rhythmic spaces, unaware.
Space has its own laws. At their core
there
is the Will to matter, the Will to wake
itself,
a creeping Will, pigheaded, poor.
Upon
the altar there are honesty leaves,
thin
as rice-paper, excellent and dead,
and then an Armistice poppy that achieves
its
purpose in that it recalls the bed
of bones beneath this hole
that breed vermiculated caves
in the dank air of a scullery,
the
work-bare, scrimshank, first yawn of the soul
from
which time flits away each century.
This
air is death’s too. Dead, the bones behind,
you
only are aware by being seen.
Time is the soul you die to find
and
you have died already. The thwart green
of downs is where your doubt
took root and voyages were planned.
Tell it the dead again. Your jaws
relay
it better than the stone. Speak out
and
hear in this tunnel the faint first applause.
