A Five-Gated Well Poems by Rowan Williams
1. Landscape
The
river swings slowly on the clay;
like a
track in the cloud chamber, the old road
of Roman
ghosts and lost dominion,
fingered with
grass and mud, still carves the fen.
The
little shrines of clunch and rubble sit,
shuttered
against the needles of a draught
that treads
the cloud chamber like a legion.
As if
the first settler here was winter,
a slow
craftsman of the shining wires
and
filigrees, laying bright frost on black soil.
2. Divinity
Frost
on black soil: when the first clerks,
wrapped tight,
caps drawn down,
first
intoned the dry music, blew on the sparks
And
rolled from the furnace the glass spires,
twined close
and polished hard,
the castle
of the schools, they kindled other fires,
Slow-burning,
flaring at last around the boards
of White
Horse Tavern chambers,
as the
restless Word scorched off its cords.
But the
scrubbed reformed sky still yearns for motions,
deep
vortices, storm towers,
for
journeys into Plato’s paradise, devotions
Like
the draught’s needles piercing the glass of sight,
stitching
philosophy
into close
music, into a formal velvet night
Of
bowing constellations.
Hung on the walls,
two
centuries’ worth of weaving,
the warm
needlework of Greek that calls
The clerks
to stir and dance again with the Word’s
sounding, returnings,
filling the
sky’s towers, nesting and circling birds.
3. Natural Philosophy
Nesting
and circling: vision catches
this or
that landing place, guesses
this or
that current down which to glide,
maps out
the architecture
of stone
and air alike.
The eye
in flight, steadily as the river’s
curved arm,
traces a single horizon
behind the crenellations and the little shrines,
and a
young Christ’s man steps on board
for the
long voyage to damp islands
where the
forms heave out of water
inch by
inch into defining light.
Back
home the sculpting wind cuts deeper,
frost cracks
down to the joint
of bone
and marrow at the heart
of
matter, the split anatomy of power
flowering for
life and death. Life’s letters
are
decoded, rescued from the floods
of blood
and breathing, hung in dry waterfalls,
stuttering an
episodic song, the marks
and pauses
of an aboriginal art.
4. Humanities
Marks
and pauses: where we cannot speak
we must
not, where we can we must,
and watch
for the dishonest leak
Of
casual silence where the white drifts
would bury
needful spare, unsparing words
of
scrutiny; or of casual talk into the rifts
of
emptiness that mirror the uncrowded sky.
Power
tends to corrupt, the patriarch said,
casting a
patient, unmerciful, Germanic eye
On the
soft histories we love to tell
(as if our past were beautiful and frozen
in what
we say, locked in the cell
Of
our control). Even in
the cold
marshland, there
is the heat of protest:
this is a
critic’s landscape, shaped to hold
The
black no less than the bright,
and the
sharp stripped trees no less
than the
water: night
Where
the stars’ little wounds pour streams
of
slender clarity, no less than days of mist
and the
mumbled theatre of waking dreams.
5.
Townscape
Waking
dreams: across the lakes
of
glowing grass, the Disneyland
pinnacles drape
themselves with ice.
Into
the nest of grass, timber,
Tudor
brick and stone, the straight
fen tracks
run silently, treading
like a
legion. Yellow-grey houses,
small clay
ovens against the winter,
stare at the
postcard castles from time
to time:
quizzical, grateful,
suspicious,
knowing they are needed,
shrugging at the
mind’s obsessional
drive to
forget where it belongs
and what
it owes. And the Roman roads
fortify
themselves in glowing glass
where the
academy as it passes
reads
silicon reflections. Roads, houses,
river,
ice-framed sanctuaries,
all of
them framing the human eye,
discovering the
human eye
within the
human eye’s fathomless black soil.
© Rowan
Williams 2009