The Poetry Society

 

Thirty-seven years have kept alive

The memory of Kildare. I picture it

As if it happened only yesterday,

That road advancing through the cut-back woods

And margins pocked with stumps and hostile grass;

Mud-puddles, deep-rutted brimming carriage tracks;

Hovels with pens of horses, ducks and pigs,

Birds starting, lifting from the fiery branches

Creation dying in the dropping leaves –

Yes, everything was in a state of flux.

Then at my destination, the grace of God,

The miracle – a vista of the world

Sub specie aeternitatis

A fountain in the new Jerusalem

Immutability within a book. 

 

My yearning for high honour, privilege,

For the establishment of my desires,

Now crumbles like the log that holds my gaze;

The empty fenlands of east Anglia,

The shrivelling gales of unfulfilment

Exacerbate regrets that feed on dreams

Once nurtured on the hills of Wales.

One consolation in my final years

Is that the presence of the Lord in nature

Or rhetoric, art or writing words

Requires a witness for its consummation.

And for a couple of hours in Kildare

One ordinary autumn evening

I played a tiny part in his grand scheme.

God's art, I think, does not distinguish

Between the evil, lazy or ambitious;

It simply shines a beam of what I'd call

A metamorphic light.

It does not care how we respond to it.

I wavered when it mattered, and my heart

Clamped up: the implications were too much –

I feared I would have lost my courtly life

Painstakingly constructed leaf on leaf

Among the hierarchs of sycophancy.

At least I recognised the chance to change.

At least my heart responded to creation.

I turned away, but not through ignorance.

 

Kildare had drawn me like a moth to flame

Because I had to see the gospel book

Held by the monastery of St Brigid.

In all my years of holy servitude

I'd never actually felt God's warmth

Or heard his voice, or even seen an angel.

My heart had always bustled with advancement

Had shrunk the space for truth, so I suppose.

And now this chance arose: the book was said

To be the work of some angelic being,

A glimpse, apparently, of glorious things

That we would only witness after death.

How could I miss this opportunity

To trespass in the forbidden realm of Light?

 

Evening was tugging down the sun

As I approached the outskirts of the town.

Inside the gate the dimming mushy streets

Were hazed in turf-smoke, and a sewage stink

Wafted along their narrow arteries;

The monastery was grey and mildewy,

A great sad beast, with puddles on the flagstones

And too much talking in the corridors;

The prior was a melancholy man

His hair a flaming red, a shade too long.

He called me, studiously, 'your excellency'

With too much stress on it, and just too loud.

And yet his Latin had an elegance.

 

Beside a fire that hissed without a flame

I told him why I'd graced him with my visit

And couldn't hide from him my eagerness.

He seemed to prey on this, and to enjoy

The endless protocol, formalities,

Our cursory, polite, exchange of news

Until my sentences became more clipped.

At last he asked me if I wished to hear

The story of the holy book's creation –

By this time I was very agitated

But forced a tired smile of nonchalance

Suppressing fantasies of murdering him.

So, settling in, he began to tell the tale.

 

'There was a certain monk,

A talented illuminator, who,

The night before he had to start

His labour of creation

Received a vision of an angel

Which offered in its outstretched hands

A tablet shining like a mirror:

Engraved on it were spheres of light

Enclosing filigrees of threads

Of sun, and in between the circles

Flowed shining lines, crisscrossing

In mazy patterns, like swallows;

Their ends split up and curved away

Entwined again to form new spaces,

And you could see the process

Was leading to infinity

And yet it led back to the earth

By way of human beings

Resplendent in their primal forms:

Saints crowned in aureoles

Arrayed in richly coloured robes;

And there were eagles, griffins, lions,

Peacocks, and all more real than life;

Around them fluid colours swirled

In shades of twilight blue and crimson

In gold and dragonfly viridian

As if the aurora borealis

Were trapped within the frame.

 

'The monk sat rigid, so enraptured

That when the angel asked him

If he could copy what he saw

His lips could barely mouth a "no".

The angel bade him pray to Brigid

To ask the Lord to scrape away

Impediments of earthly dross

And open up his spiritual eye.

Next night the angel shone again

With other tablets of creation

Each one a web of dazzling webs.

But now the monk was able to

Absorb – without an act of will –

Each circle, arc and scroll,

Each creature, plant and saint,

The minutiae and the whole.

Next day he settled down to paint

And found he needed no invention

But simply copied what he'd seen.'

 

The prior stopped and took a long deep breath.

I felt as if I hadn't breathed at all;

The tale confirmed what I had always held:

Imagination is nothing

But the recollection of the holy.

 

Satisfied he had prepared me well

The prior rose and gestured me to follow.

Inside the chapter house, beside large candles,

The book lay open on a wooden lectern.

My mind revisited the angel's vision

My heart tapped quickening footsteps on my ribs.

So here it was: the miracle from heaven.

My eyes flicked up and down the page too fast

Saw nothing to their liking – instant rage

Of disillusion at what seemed a mess:

Beneath the flickerings of candle flames

Swathes of suffocating detail

Disjunctive colours, a sort of randomness,

Though I confess the opulence was striking.

I fought frustration, forced myself to look

Until there came a metamorphosis:

It was like when your eye looks through

The surface of a pond and gradually

Discerns among the darkened reeds and stones

The late-sun radiance of static carp –

So my vision relaxed, grew sharper:

I saw the Christ in glory on the temple 

 

His golden hair encircled by the sun-disk

And crowned by angels hovering; the devil

Was tempting him, a spidery charcoaled creature,

His body hunched and wasted, scratchy wings,

A fly trapped between the pages.

As I stared at Christ and his opponent

At all the faces of the witnesses

The columns filled with plaited strings of gold

And squirming knots of serpents hissing

I felt such infinite vitality

A wave of bliss, then suddenly I thought

I heard a whisper, as shivery as hackles:

You shall worship the Lord your God,

And him only shall you serve.

I saw sharp lights darting like fireflies

And for a moment thought perhaps a vision

Was being granted me at last, but no,

There was just a blurring of the image –

I gripped the book and bit my bottom lip

Then, steadier, I turned the pages over

Compelled myself to stare at them until

A peacefulness descended, like a dove.

 

Page after page I seemed to find myself

Inside the mind of God before creation.

Each leaf was plunged with wells of light, and dyed

With liquid jasper, amber, rubies,

And everywhere gold lines laced round and twirled

In patterns beyond the craft of human hands.

Turned upside down within a world that lay

Before our birth or after death,

I lost my sense of self for several hours;

Half-conscious of those ghostly, whispered words

I lost my inbred craving for advancement

And all my dogged fantasies of power.

All of a sudden life felt drained of meaning,

Unfocused on the absolute and meshed

In sticky webs of visceral striving.

I saw the lines of other destinies

Evolving, turning, spreading, interlinking,

Like all the possibilities I'd missed,

I saw the riches I had turned my back on –

Insisting on my single rutted path –

The crucial life force I had failed to seize,

God's flowing love and creativity

Which were, till now, just barren abstract things.

Confronted by the templates of creation

My face felt old, the death mask of my soul,

My thoughts too tired, too mired in compromise,

My pride was like the devil, shrivelled up

By the immensity of truth or beauty,

Or love or what you will: I called it God.

 

Of course the book's enchantment did not last.

Next day the distancing of memory

The encrustations of ambitiousness

Edged back across my newly opened heart:

The book it seems was simply not enough.

What if I'd seen the sacred light direct

Just as that blessèd – blasted – monk had done –

The living revelation of the angel

Without the interference of dead vellum.

What if, what if ...

 

And now I try to warm my blue-veined hands

Around a bitter heart, reflect upon

A life that slowly burned to ashes.

I had one chance, perhaps, to turn to God

But could not let myself, break free, run home

Towards my Father's welcoming embrace.

What might have been remains a starving ghost

Feeding on crumbs of self-recrimination.

I bear, till death, the impact of that book

An ever-fading, never-fading bruise.

At least it taught me one thing: that God's art

Is not material, an object, but a moment,

A flash or thundercrack within your brain

Before you have the time to think, reflect,

Making your tiny world expand, and making

You see you'll never be the same again.

 

I still remember trudging from Kildare,

The early morning mist a pure white shroud.

Sun slowly peeled the air and filtered colours

Through fields and lines of thinning dying trees.

The rubbly route to Dublin stretched ahead

Unconvoluted and predictable.

And as I rode back to my courtly stage

Everywhere, everything just felt so flat.

It was, I think, my fortieth year back then

And my days were turning page by page

With nothing painted on them.