Not the Night Sky
April night, stars, a scrap of moon,
the huge north wall of the church
massive as a liner
and this gravel garden
where you're wondering
how to describe the sky.
Perhaps that the stars are hung uneven
like flushed lamps in a sacristy
and the moon is a relic bone
in a monstrance of tangled trees?
Is that the Plough? you ask
talking to stars.
The stars know nothing – not their names
nor their twinkling, not that they fall,
are pocketed, wished on or scrutinised.
Nothing is what the stars know.
Nothing. A nothing
which goes on for ever
and cannot be imagined
except by the dead
who are not tucked up neat
in the earth by the church.
And the church –
chancel, clerestory, parvise
and knapped flint crenellations –
slips away, slides quiet as the sky
through silt-meadow and shingle,
past creek and salt marsh
to the sea which is no longer there.
(This poem was published in Acumen 51, 2005 and appears in The Goodbye Edition) |