The Otherness of Saints

 

I have been watching you, too closely, or rather too clearly

 

You have the troubled otherness of the Saints, the same place their thoughts are kept, the conversations mostly with angels, they envy the involvement and sacredness of the ordinary that others have. Burnt tongued and cinder breathed from tasting too many heavenly coals. In wood paneled halls of candles, blown bent by the East Wind’s  insistent clawing, reached with untraceable steps, you have seen, seared by a depth of silence that molds by it’s space and emptiness, not it’s doing. I see you, standing by the chapel door uncertain, fidgeting unrestful in the congregation of the righteous.

 

I believe you when you talk, so talk slowly, tell me why, you always see yourself running down narrow streets as you go off to sleep, lie riding on the South Wind rising from the darkness with  the Plough stars flaring. Your poor anguished face of  ‘who will shelter me?’, ‘who will shelter me?  The strange otherness of saints, stumbling to run sentences together, you sense the dawn, the test, the summoning,  days, hours before it comes you know, elated by unarrived things. There’s a wave far out to sea that is only known by the sea yet, and you hear it surge, charge with force and spill out even  before it’s sent. For you it has already broken, gone and retuned to make another wave with frothing atoms that pull together  for a partner again, and again. Riding on the West Wind  the carried scent of spring, you smell it long before it finds a root and comes down from the sky.  

 

Who talks to you on the edge of  sleep?. The strange otherness of saints who sit too long alone in woods, curl up and wait for winter on the  mezzanine floor of empty parks.

 

Who talks to you on the edge of sleep? Christ?  outside of cathedral? Chapel? mission hall? Kiss the flame while it is close. He’s braced against the North Wind’s rage the storms are stopped and sent in turn.  Weren’t you marked when they measured your skull with sharp calipers? yes you were, pressed the points in from all the angles  until they crisscrossed your face with scares, read the bumps on your head like Brail for those who can not see,
and translated it all wrong.

 

I have been watching you, too closely,

 

There’s a  voice in a  language you don't understand saying

‘This is man who won't learn from history, this is man who has forgotten mystery’.

Godhead one, two, three, tell me what you see, tired eyed saint, on the edge of sleep,  it can so  trouble you, one footfall behind the sundial’s daily round and two ahead of the moon’s.

Litergy

 

We Met a Man at the Crossroads

 

We met a man at the crossroads of the fields

He was two pints friendly, three pints chatty,

Sitting on the bridge over the dyke.

He picked a pinch of tobacco and
Rolled it in clean white paper,

Liking the attention of the square bully dog
Saying he had two brindles at home
He smiled and joked.

Looking back he was still sitting there
In the hub of the fields.

I had fallen in behind him when I saw him
Standing where the hares squat

In the shelter of the bean field,

I thought he was suspicious of me,
So I was cautious of him.

We wondered if he was an angel as he seemed
To have come from no-where and was in no hurry
To get anywhere,

Glad to have been friendly to a stranger you wondered

If angels smoked roleys and had brindle dogs
At home, in heaven.

I thought they probably did.