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PILGRIM
The
winter sun sets early
a
luminous mist like the glimpse of the seasons’ focus
(hourly,
yearly)
in
meditation, which too, behind the coppice
of
isolation, sets in haste,
leaving
the night and its noises, raucous,
and
its garish flickers, its fires, and worst,
its
people, behind
to
be faced.
Therefore
my saint bullied hard
the
stony footways of Hampshire,
and
felt it was well that he did
so
alone, that he was alone to hear
his
footsteps clouted back
through
the cold of the year
from
either edge of the track
that
led through the allegorical wood.
It
was his especial luck
to
be puppeted through a winter world,
not
through libidinous spring,
not
through the summer, wed-
ded
and done for, nor through the pang
of
compassionate autumn,
but
only along
the
winter lane (rotten
with
bones, admitted,
but
not with the sign of flesh so often).
My
saint had quitted
the
mirth and moan of his folk;
as
he stalked along he battered
all
the impatience they could evoke
under
his feet into love.
And
all of his loves awoke
in
the woodland around, until they began to live
the
poet’s animist fantasia.
A
thorny old cove
groped
in a bush like a ridiculed soothsayer,
with
a nose as dewy and red
as
the left-over hips, the icier
for
sniffing through the straggles of old man’s beard.
An
ash tree dyed with the recent rain
leaned
like a clerk who was over-tired
with
the stained grey-suited self he’d grown
and
the buds of his fingers (black);
a
cow reproached with an upturned grin;
and
that was all that my good man struck
with
his evil eye: not a sign of the sleepy gardener mole;
no
butcher’s scoundrel, scavenging shrike;
no
tipster robin, out of a meal,
no
brimstone’s (simply elegant) debutante;
not
a smile
from,
not a tint
of
the staggering wisely painted lady;
not
a hint
of
tomtits playing children in the hedges.
Indeed, he
only
looked to catch his favourites:
a
couple of crows, cold and seedy,
huffing
their wings and as hungry as curates.
The
scene enervated, but my saint inhaled
(pleased
not to need the solace of barbiturates):
he
grew down the weather into his bones, and he called
his
weather by the name of humility,
waiting
hard for the Grace that Cared
to
come with its lamb-coloured cover of pity
and
level the hideous sticks of the winter.
Gradually
the sight he
loved,
the snowflake’s saunter,
encircled
his vision and entered his heart,
until
he began to wonder
however
the world could be so hurt
by
rheumaticky men with bovine stares,
since
everywhere there the snow could assert
that
they all found rest in its great indoors.
My
saint trudged on in his narrow steps,
and
the cold brought almost passionate tears
to
his all-seeing eyes. Behind
the dips
of
his great awareness,
down
on the cusp
of
his swinging integrity, the swan-
sung,
almost-a-halo sun
went
through its wanes
and
set. The great good man
headed
for home,
with
its fireside people huddling in
on
his mind already. His
condescending scheme
welcomed
then all.
However,
they did not feel the same;
they
turned his back and looked at his soul
then
wrote the epilogue.
‘He
must be tolerated for a while
with
other winter rig,
but
when the forgetting season is the forgotten of the year’s,
with
that he must be crowded back
under
the moving stairs.’
Alan
Marshfield
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