Poem: Westminster Abbey

*I'd like to thank this poem's first publisher, Dan Schneider, who has published it on the fantastic Cosmoetica.com.  I highly recommend both the site and Dan's own poetry to be found there.  I reproduce it here after putting some work into it, because I have never really been happy with it's first form.  I want to acknowledge my gratitude to him not only for publishing this in its first form, but also for writing what in my opinion is the best corpus of poetry I know of.

”know your feelings were already felt

before this cathedral became your world"

                                    --Dan Schneider, “Refrain of the RCA Building”

Westminster Abbey

This is no cathedral, merely a haunt for sinners,

Where they have cast their stones

Together, to form a heaven that held

Angels themselves, fast into architecture.

Is this hour the recline of God?  Some say

He rests in the transept of elements

Upon an exhaled prayer; others that no

Amount of silver mints a value worth                                                   

The pillars of a faith peasants began.                                                   

"Silver and gold I do not have, but such"                                                    

It was said, "as I have..."  Not to silver

Was it given to heal on heaven's high

Spires, towered in time turned back,

But to a boulder rolled off of the grave

Bearing the miracle behind.

Then is an abbey not miraculous, if                                           A Prayer Exhaled Is

Visible?  A body's a heavy dust,                                     

Gravel awaiting the wind,

                                                                                    Heavy with hands, offered to candelight,

                                                                                    Which cores me in this holy cavity.

                                                                                    And I assume this collar, not by weight

                                                                                    Of worth to wear it, nor to deny

                                                                                    How planets fall from a star's bright dress;

                                                                                    Rather to handle a past not made in my

                                                                                    Image.  It glows in the groove of the cross

                                                                                    Hung round my neck, where fire claims this room

                                                                                    I have mined for other meanings.  And the dross,                                                   

Is this not wondrous?  What if it were
Breathed upon?  What if                                              

England were cast into speech, its tenses                                                        

Woven in one said verb, wreathed in the vow

The dust is destined for and cannot escape?

Westminster, cloister of its own memory, more dead

Than living in its fray.  What future could purchase a past                                

Like this, and who be its pardon?

Here all will be pardoned, when the young stone falls

On perished arches, and rings the verdict

Buried beneath these bells, and beckons

The past to account for what was done with it—

                                                                                    Melts into a candle, all but consumed

                                                                                    By the cross and its fire, and seared

                                                                                    In the quarry of a torch-lit tomb,

                                   

                                                                                    This chancel, where secrets that never escaped my years

                                                                                    May lie, without knowledge or fear, of the small hell

                                                                                    In a candle, though men should fear.

                                                                                    Tremble, my soul, in its show and tell.

                                                                                    Gather and confess thy sins.  Return

                                                                                    'Til all is repented, each hidden sin bewailed,

                                                                                    Not one bloody word untold. Now and then be burned 

                                                                                    Out of me, until I fall in the midst of the burning,

                                                                                    Exnihilate, extinguished in the burn.

                                     

The past that never extinguishes, but carves                                           

Itself in tablets stretched high in the testament

Limestone fills with the frailty of its art,

Reaching at God by a means so much

Like kneeling.  Or if not, like Babel, the tongue

Fissured in the feint to flirt with godhead.

But this abbey is not for talking in. 

It is for pardon:  for the permission to

Elide in the already

Said, fixing a prayer in the wet mortar

Of one’s own tongue, the remembered English

Habit of harboring critique

In its own tale—as if a word could embody

What comes after it and ferry it

Pastward.

    It only remains to do

What must be done, what has been done, and is

Not done easily:  to trace the sentence etched in

This rock, and mark the martyrs fixed to its walls                                  

As they speak.  There appears Oscar, San Romero,

Rid of the cartridge that cored him, calling

Birds to sift the supper of his hand,

Bitter only to those who do not taste,                           

And invisible, but for the blood on the stone.               

Does it bleed then, the future into the past thought       

Settled, swaddled, made particular, like dust,

Always is?  Does it animate?  God knows

Time's whole conversion as if it were the fall

Of a sparrow's feather, or a single

Stone off the vastness of this construction,

So when Romero calls the birds, it is not simply                                   

A tremor in the towers turned out.

                                                                                    Your songs ring the chamber of my believing.

                                                                                    I call them, but they breathe the wind

                                                                                    Through old towers. They luminesce in the wings

                                                                                    This fire raises upward, with my hands

                                                                                    Ahold of a stone, drawn up in candles' fire

                                                                                    defining their silhouette:  perhaps my hands,                 

                                                                                    so near invisible, framed in fire, where

                                                                                    All is transformed into fragrant bread, and a bird

                                                                                    Conceives in wine and smoke:  rumor of prayer. 

The rumor of wings accrues in the ear of believing:

The words pecked out of his hand will allay

The cracked rhyme, of his world and his day.

So called birds return to their making

Home in the hand of a saint.  And again—                                         

That is the habit of the particular,                                                         

That pretense to permanence.  The abbey endures

Not only to witness the apathy

Wrung out of such beautiful

Fashioning; but to breathe in the whence of these towers,

Raised earth, dirt sculpted, miraculous and seen

To be so.  Wondrous, how the dead have endured

In the etching of them, and how this breath

Has thrilled their witness into the living                                                

Speech. And how they are bound to utterance

No vision catches all of.  Were they without

Sin, who cast enormity past that

Which thought promises, forth in sequential   

Defining?  These annotations—

Do they read in the body

Of England’s endurance?  A tower is

A tower; the breath that fills it names it,

The breath of a prayer exhaled, O Lord,

Refashioned in this writerly purview                                                    

Which is not stone; how then can it rise to you?