I stand under this vault
of our common church –
off-centre on this sea-girt isle
Our stone tradition of roofing
is more to do with fools’ fires
than Heaven’s weight
Here the light is insipid –
no tang of incense
only the blue miasma
off flume emissions
My legs tire – but find no pew –
no tuffet to take me
to the path’s cathartic
kneel-down call
I am entertained inside her lento lungs –
travelling alone and partly dusk-blind –
within her low suck of cooling breath –
I inhale her exhale of purest oxygen
and with it comes an unwinding –
an expansion of my otiose senses –
an awareness of this as existing –
of living things set around – but
obscured by the falling of the hour –
Now the manic chp-chp-chp-chp-chp
of panicked blackbirds to one side –
joined by the rude crows overhead –
that tuneless duet of birdsong is overlaid
on itself by others’ alarms and queries
which set off – concentric – around me –
As I tread – as I compact the leafy mucus –
which she absorbs into her membrane –
the fallen are re-sown by the plough
of my steps on this weaved footpath –
Her cold stew of re-use – of rotting down –
is nature’s re-design – it is not random –
be it the branched capillary urge
of saplings – or the fork of tipped boughs –
or the patterning of her cast off leaves –
already thick enough to hide the paths –
Now on cinders I miss the give of the mulch –
the weighted compress and its last sound
The olfactory hit kicks in –
smelling at a filed return
of youthful tree climbing –
of guns-made-from-sticks
and of our lumpen crashing
among swallowing bracken
I am now drawing so deeply
on this propel of perfumes –
of the under-tree rotten scents –
and also taking the shaded chill –
which seems to feed the smell –
which was the first suggestion
My childhood – found in the kernels
of peeled sweet chestnuts –
was so open-ended that nothing
was going to set a conclusion –
Then on to the unexpected
cinder path – where it ends – again
We stick to the leaf-kicked route –
a parting of the dry sea of leaves
cleared by dog-following boots –
We tack down its meandered drop
to the time-softened abyss –
plugged not by God – but drains –
where a watercourse once hollowed
the hillside into this shallow dean –
before the slugs of tarmac upstream –
Here the irregular plots of silver birches
ignore the fallen old lady in lime green –
this is the parish of ineffectual giants –
these natives – a copse within the woods –
are a finger-daubed fearful tribe in white –
chary – waiting – as if standing ready –
listening for the infected invaders
from other places – for intruders
who will bring other such followers
to spread the canker and pestilence –
which was not the way things changed –
not until we changed the weather
There is an almost mist of ghostly off-loadings –
like pellucid Nan Tuck – or the long-lost Lord Lucan
My night now haunts me as a half-recalled dream
I breathe and count steps – taught by Seneca’s NHS –
Let only your body wander – don’t admit useless thoughts
The dog bounds due east in her leaps at life’s time
Unseen from overhead I’m no more standing – erased
under glances of passenger lists –
I am lost in the skinned canopy’s leaf-bare branches
I am then ducking below berry-weighted evergreens –
where the temperature drops by one or two degrees –
and still the weakened sun scathes my misted wine eyes
