Chipping Campden

The light, being gold, does not end. The stone, being gold, does not end. A gradual folding and unfolding, as a sheet of woven paper that conceals some message of import—drawn out, read, and replaced except that here one lives and breathes that testament. And bells— I should have expected bells, their peals wrung like oil from the evening’s silk handkerchief. The flock gathers for its parliament on the granite steps of the abandoned gatehouse, which in its turn nods to the remaining pear and apple trees of the orchard. It is too soon to pluck their fruit. I stand in the grass and judge that it is too soon, even as I stretch my grasp towards the lowest branch. My evening shadow falls on the ewes and lambs in the lower pasture, gathered by the wall in rote expectation. To receive a message is to participate in time, in the bright bonfire that is time’s amanuensis. Salt crusts beneath my collar as the breeze freshens. I no longer have a working definition of the word “unnecessary,” even as the will draws it from the mind, as with tongs. The fraternal lid is semi-spherical, a dormitory for the coldest Abels which I have left behind on another continent, without the anchor’s itinerant blue sheen. The light, being pastoral, sites the wick in the snug flesh: of the man, of the beast, of the pear. I speak horizon as a third language, hair fallen from the cheek of a reaped corpse. Its grammar is sudden and brief. The ash tree gnaws it. From the back entrance one may absorb the most stately absences, the cleansing liniment, the fermata’s half-root lingering like an arum in damp ground. Request news of love stop. Request quickdeft brasses to worry death’s black beads in chancel stop. Loom as both toll and animal, to which the body is applied as some fragrant butchery. We were warned off the site of life as we are warned off the site of death. There is no time left, I wrote, to frighten the children—you can look across, into that empty laughter, towards which mercy aligns. In my dream I did not contain enough blood to suit the needs of the people, and so they cut my hair. They kept cutting it. The eye of the sparrow, uncomprehending and volt-rinsed. It knows its own fear which it carries aloft among the green rudders of the plain. A meadow’s golden spray, the civil depth of it, i.e., the separable soul takes all too little space within the larger pattern. How it runs now from the clatter in the lengthening dusk. This is the sermon abundance kept preaching to us, while we were in the capital. This is landscape’s “likely prop of attention” from the curtailed charrette. My arm is still raised, an image through which the pattern flows. I want to craft from it a definition for “dwell.” Dearest master, I touch your green horn. You don’t shed it and I don’t either, in any season. This we have in common: we are monsters. We drink from the same pitted bowl. The wound, being gold, does not end. The light, being gold, being wound in turn around faith’s glistening spindle, spends itself as a break in the cartilaginous vane. Where there is intent there is security, that bludgeoning alloy. Let us reenact the debt incorrectly, this time for charity’s strabismic sake. The burden of the valley of vision, which is to say, of shelter. I lower my arm as if the object of my gaze had slipped from my sight.