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This way to the floodlighting, ladies and gentlemen, and this way to the Visitor Centre.
The world is collecting its winters and as we pass we collect ours, floodlit some of them, some gently candle-lit, some fierce with fire, some hardly visited by light at all.
This way to the illuminating manuscript, ladies and gentlemen, and this way to the old plays
I am eating chips with the saints after dark, looking out over a town so lit up it must be someone’s party here every day, and the noise of traffic is constant, souls on their way.
I wonder if soul is renewed like skin, like heart, like other tissues of us after crying, after crawling, laughing, running, thinking, writing, crying, picking up the loose thread of soul-stuff.
No-one gets a medal for bringing the festivities around again, no command has brought winter on and the need for warmth, when it reaches us we sing meaning at it and warm our souls.
I am eating chips with the saints after dark, sitting on the great stone, half-believing conversation is possible, laying a few chips on this cold stone, not betting on it but here in the flesh asking a blessing.
Our Lady is taking off with her child on a magic carpet. Through her lowered eyes she will see the shipwrightes and fysshers and maryers acting out the great flood. She will see the play change and change again, she will see our world of floodlighting.
This way to the floodlighting, ladies and gentlemen, and this way to the walls completed to be lit.
I am eating chips with the saints after dark in the roofless world, at the edge of thought, turning over words.
O strange animals that care in us,
strange strong animals lie waiting for an end in us,
oh dry animals that mourn in us,
coiled serpents are knotted in us,
rare butterflies look for flowers in us,
dear dark animals stretch dying in us,
bats fly in circles in our caves,
oh strange animals heal us.
Let’s meet one evening at the Abbey well, I’m thinking we’ll sing quietly at the Abbey well.
A body disintegrates in that silent place, hear the bone’s sharp ring down the Abbey well.
There is a man who knows exactly what’s there or seems to, when it’s raining, at the Abbey well.
No-one knows a monk who knew a monk who knew a monk who drank long, at the Abbey well.
Natural water with minerals, still , by the bottle, across borders, in places far flung, from the Abbey well.
Hear now the cry of the wounded, stricken hart, here, here, precisely here, stung, at the Abbey well.
When the dead—
When the dead in their nightshirts parade before us their unfinished lives and on their long journeys call back, call back to us night after bleak night, the shadows lit through the windows glowing warm must be hallowed with a candle kept lit shaking and the welcoming hearth fed dried sap.
The island is a woman waiting at the edge of the world, the sky is a trowel ready to scoop up soul when the woman sings to tell time to give them up.
There is real grass here, real sheep, the sky I have known without windows, real clouds, stone walls, a track, a tractor, gates, real gulls, real swallows, real rocks, real sea, waves, butterflies, my own heart cranking, my old eyes in need of washing, dated dirt on them, real grass, real rocks, real clouds being shaped and reshaped, real oystercatchers, real waves, real sheep, real gates, walls, a track. People
in their flesh walk the island, they chat and laugh. They grasp the island with their cameras. The stray mongrel that I am inspects crags, sings to himself fragments of old tunes and makes up new ones, goes back to his hut for tea.
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