The Waker's Corridor: Poems

Mystery Plays

Mystery Plays from the York Cycle 65 I. The Barkers’ Play (12:66) Dear light, scattered on your hat brim, come follow me into the nearest garden. The combed streets freshly tarred. Men in the trade winds shuffle their cards. A crescent is calmly forming where the barkers’ play begins in the devil-light Of morning. Sound breaks on a hammer strike. A cowbell hangs from the beginning Tanner’s wrist. Heaven is wheeled in. White leather draped over a throne at its Height. Wings held up on stakes. Flapping like flags in a puppet country march. Stay close to your mother. Those men in masks are real men. Just like your father Was when he played here. There’s nothing to be afraid of. He only talks that way. The milk pale hand of the angel grays. Harrow! He falls from the air. Sky’s blank Trapdoor. From heaven (the pageant wagon) down as a tumbler. Fast into the dark Free of glee. Thrown a glint in the round opened mouth. Murk mask of the pavement And crowd in domes above him. Umbrellas close with a cheer. The devil’s with us. 66 II. The Skinners’ Play (19:50) The plays swing full by noon. At the second station, where we Sit on the scaffold before the Harphams’ house, Micklegate Road has disappeared in audience. The cycle’s gone halfway Through fall and fall, flood and birth and miracle. He rides A donkey through all of us. A swelling path crowds, narrows, And contracts. The players play us. Zacchaeus climbs above Calling our birch a sycamore. He can see the wagon train grow Heavy on its way from the priory. If he looks toward the Ouse, The rest continue down stations. It keeps repeating: again And again, equations set in motion, thinning past the bend. Maybe by now, the angels fall a twelfth time at the Pavement. If you could, like that child there climbing past the skirts And sales carts, ducking under the low stride of the donkey; If you could run nimbly across the bridge, through the curve At Coney Street, cutting past the Wymans’ garden for Common Hall, up Stonegate, circling the city to its center, swift, Unseen as a rabbit or mouse; if you knew the town since birth, And if you were low enough and young—if you came this way, you May see, in passing images, the whole story told backwards. 67 III. The Girdlers and Nailers’ Play (11:38) Father in a gown. A harp on his head. Those kids Are eating chocolate pudding. A salesman in a Motley suit, kiting off a mechanized falcon. Who is light enough to be carried away on this? Hands in the air, sleeves down the shoulders, Spoons highest of all. The youngest searches A booth above her head. Fingers blindly trace Cool lead circles on a leash. She moves to a row Of miniatures—a horse, a sheep, a foal, a cow— All made of tin. She plucks them one by one, and Tries them in her mouth. They taste like sand. 68 IV. The Chandlers’ Play (6:36) On the wall, a horse tied to a change-house, Tiny. A candle in the glass above, its flame The same burnt hay sloping across the whole Encaustic pasture: snow patched, trees to Hazel strings, a bird trap. Unpeopled now. Three crooks lean against a flat muted sky. 69 V. The Fishers and Mariners’ Play (10:34) Saturn clinched sadly in his belt, like a Sage’s neglected boulder by a whetstone Hunched, resting a sandwich on his round Middle, like an old baby on a new one. From A bowl of porridge, a great, cloth-brown Pear in broth, the dumpling’s ears float Half to the palette and half to the copper Basin. Seven doves caged in a hull coo for Dough from the wagon’s skirt. Their five Brothers look down from the clerestory. 70 VI. The Pinners’ Play (14:28) Again, again the tree it bends, it Shudders. Shut up already. Still It. Four wedges will do. It’s like A table then? You’re like a magpie A jay. Babble babble. The mortise Doesn’t receive it like a tenon in A dovetail. In, in, in, over, over All this fitting for the pinners. Tomorrow you’ll...