Parish Ghosts

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Parish GhostsPoems from English Churches and Churchyards

Giles Watson

Expanded Edition: 2012


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The Shadow ConsecratesThe shadow consecrates the stone

Between the altar and the bone:

A tangible absence.I stand without; within they sing,

My soul and theirs all spiralling

Towards some Presence.

I see the Light, I hear the Call

Between the lychgate and the wall,

And keep my distance.

The shadow weaves the loom of loss:

A hollow tomb, an empty cross

Raised like a monstrance.

The shadow consecrates the bone

That lies beneath the lichened stone

And I am Present.

The congregation sing within

By gargoyles tail and angels wing

And I am Absent.

Written outside Uffington Church, Oxfordshire, on a winters night.


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Window Study

From this angle, my own reflection

Leaks in runnels like molten sugar

As I scry the windows, readingRefracted angels. They sing

Prognostications, each one wearing

A green patina of algal bloom

And mirrored woodbine. A knight

Reclines in the day-dark of a yew,

The altar flowers arranged

Amongst chimney-pots, preserved

In toffee, chains of candelabras

Suspended in emerald confection.

Pulpits swirl beneath the stirring,

Blurred by blackthorn. Fonts

Stand under streams, leaves

Dappling the nave,

And down the aisle there dances

A line of graves.

Inspired by windows from a variety of churches in Oxfordshire. Picture:

Besselsleigh Church, Oxfordshire.


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Moth-Flight

The spotlights trained upon the church

Burn like braziers, churn out a pulse

Of lucent praise, and moths each oneA trembling soul spire like sparks

In their quests for self-extinction.

Kestrels sleep. Shrews channer

In the undergrowth. Bats

Burst out of belfries in a blaze

Of dark. Moths are stars,

And men, embers,Quaking, mortal.

The church bell tolls

And keeps the total.

Inspired by moths attracted to the spotlights which illuminate Uffington

Church, Oxfordshire.


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Fonts and Corbels

A hound stalks upside down

A stag of seven tines;

A snake writhes on her side,A knot, a hoop, a line.

A fish swims through the air,

A bird flies through a sea,

A squirrel digs a hole,

A rabbit climbs a tree.

A cart before a horse,

A fox killed by a fowl,

An owl is mocked by wrens,

A demon wears a cowl.

A pig plays at the pipes,

A beetle stings a bee,

A woman spreads her legs

And gives birth to a tree.

A donkey bears the Christ,

A monkey wears a crown,

A saint works like a witch,

A hound stalks upside down.

Inspired by inverted imagery from medieval churches from across the country.

The upside-down hound comes from a corbel in Avon Dasset; the knotted

snake and airborne fish adorn the font at Hinton Parva; the cart before the

horse and the pig playing bagpipes are on a misericord at Beverley Minster; thefox is hanged by geese at Bristol cathedral; the owl is mobbed by birds at

Gloucester cathedral, and so on. Reynard the Fox is sometimes depicted

wearing a cowl. The bird, the squirrel, the beetle and the rabbit are products of

my own fevered imagination.


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Adam and Eve

Adam delved; Eve span

In the primeval light.

Adam swore; Eve spat;

Speared the serpent

Out of spite.

There it writhed

Upon her spindle,

Eyes extinguished.

God kindled First Lust,

Made Cain (by Sex straight

Dust was getting out of date)

Specifically to spill

The brains of Abel, still

Mewling Mama in the crib.

Hed make this kill

Expediently, by will of God

As punishment for Adams Rib

Having kicked up such a stink

In getting so far out of synch

With chaste Creation,

Thus buggering the Holy Plan.

The serpent wriggled as it will

So who, then, was the gentleman?

Hook Norton is a venerable church, but is currently under an Evangelicalregime which appears to scorn its history. Most of the church furnishings have

been swept away by the present revival, but the beautiful Norman font

remains. When Adam delved and Eve span/Who then was the gentleman?

was a radical catch-cry in the days before the Civil War. I am probably indebted

to Robert Graves for the tone and structure of this poem, and to T.S. Eliot, that

most Christian of modern poets, who was, nevertheless, willing to recognise

that honest blasphemy was more faithful to art than a cloying, soulless

orthodoxy.


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Orientis partibus

From eastern lands came an ass

Asinine and bold as brass,

Strong as any handsome oxBearing burdens, hauling rocks.

Hup! Hup! Giddyup, Sir Ass!

High up the hills of Sychen

Donkey-sired under Reuben,

He sloshed across the Jordan

A-braying like an organ.


In mules, roebucks, put no trust

Theyll not see Sir Ass for dust.

Madianite, swift and hairy,

Faster than a dromedary!


Pierre de Corbeil: Conduit Manuscrit de Sens , paraphrased from the Latin.

This lyric opens the reconstructed text of the thirteenth century Feast of Fools,

as performed by Obsidienne on their album La Fte des Fous, (Calliope, 2005).Pierre de Sens was a scholastic philosopher, and was Bishop of Sens until his

death in 1222. The song was most likely sung as a part of the Donkeys Festival

at the Feast of the Circumcision on January 1, and in the course of the mass, a

donkey was ridden into the church, in honour of the Flight into Egypt. Asses

occupied an ambivalent place in mediaeval lore: they were at once symbols of

folly, and creatures revered because of their association with Christ. Elements

of misrule were often associated with the Feast of Fools, sometimes with

official sanction, and sometimes without it. The festivities often involved the

promotion of a young boy to the office of Bishop for a day. By the late twelfthcentury, the Bishop of Paris found it expedient to strictly regulate the Feast of

Fools, in order to prevent orgiastic behaviour. He forbade the wearing of

animal masks and the performing of obscene songs: a tacit admission, no

doubt, that such practices were already widespread. In this respect, the Feast of

Fools seems to have reflected more ancient pagan traditions and practices

associated with the Calends in early January.

The picture shows detail from a sixteenth century window in Fairford parish

church, Gloucestershire.


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Rogationtide

Beating the bounds of the parish, I saw

The old gods on the outskirts, skulking in the woods.

It was all moonbreak and sunglow. Woodwales jittered.

Walking back through the graveyard, I heard

The wights on the gravestones, howling of the Flood.

They were jeering and gaping, as their tarsals clattered.

Passing close by the lychgate, I feltThe nightingales wounded, dreaming of dark.

There was japing and jarring. The fern-owls waited.

Going in through the narthex, I smelt

Fumes from the fox-spraint, stinking of blood,

With its dripping and clotting, lust unsated.

Pressing hard by the altar, I tasted

Sloe gin fermented, and bread made from bark.The Lady was waiting; the flowers withered.

Inspired by a misericord representing the month of May, in St. Marys Church,

Ripple, Worcestershire. At Rogationtide in the Middle Ages, the congregation

beat the bounds of the parish in a procession. A garlanded figure of the Virgin

Mary was carried before the procession, so the tradition certainly performed

the function of a fertility rite.


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Flight of Alexander

Alexander

Sought to fly;

Two griffins

Bore him nigh

To the suns

Celestial flame:

Let Icarus

Take the blame.

Some say

Alexander went

Heavenward

By his own consent;

But see here:

The griffins seek

To grip each arm

Within each beak!

His eyes bulge,

His lips are pursed:

I should say

He was coerced.

The Flight of Alexander was a common decorative scheme in late medieval

churches and manuscripts. At Charney Bassett, the griffins have seized

Alexander by the arms, and he looks distinctly surprised by his mode of

heavenly ascent.


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She Kneels Among Flowers

She kneels among flowers,

They burgeon through death:

The Lords and the Ladies

Grow up from the mould.

His feet warmed by otters,

Their dank, fishy breath

Dispels dismal humours

And Farne island cold.

He preaches to birds

For humans are deaf

To faith with no fashion:

His clothes are all sold.

To Adam, to Eve

God gave the command:

Subdue the creation

And harrow the land.

You kneel among flowers

They grow rank around.

You have the wrong notion;

You misunderstand.

The poem is inspired by an enchanting painted glass portrayal of a saint

kneeling and praying amongst flowers in the parish church of Goosey, near

Wantage. The second verse refers to St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and the third

to St. Francis. All three saints seem to me to subvert Christian orthodoxy withtheir simple dependence on nature: they are the opposite of many modern

Christians I have known, who seem to see nature as something to be distrusted

and tamed, if not annihilated altogether. I have even heard some

fundamentalists argue that global warming is a sign that the creation is

winding down, and they seem to think that it cant happen too quickly, since it

will hasten the Second Coming. May saints such as Cuthbert, Francis, and the

anonymous lady from Goosey continue to misunderstand this gospel for as

long as monotheism survives!


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Sheela-Na-Gig

He crawls towards her, his member

Rampant as some heraldic beast; her slit

Gouged in stone. Her posture says it all:

Hes in there.

And its brazen in its splendour, plain

For all to see, titillating from the church tower

Whenever you tell the time.

Her gaze pornographic:

Looking straight at you.

She is naked, not nude.

Will this wanton spreading

Ward off demons? Is his pole

A pike to impale Belial?

Or are her gaping thighs an invitation

To some promiscuous sanctity?

Are they placed so high because

This is after all the act that made man,

Or because you have to be long-sighted

To make them out

And might be embarrassed

To be caught squinting?

He crawls towards her, his memberRampant as some heraldic beast; her slit

Gouged in stone. Her posture says it all:

Hes in there.

There are Sheela-na-gigs inside and outside churches all over Britain and

Ireland, but they normally only depict a woman with spread legs and a

proportionally enormous vulva. At Whittlestone, however, the Sheela has a

consort who clearly finds her most attractive. The carving is on the church

tower, just beneath the clock, and cannot be discerned easily with the nakedeye.


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The Squatting Man

Britches round his ankles, he is squatting low,

Shitting. His dogs stoop to sniff it.

His unbuckled belt, and the look of relief

On his face confirm it,

Even though the crap has long been scraped away

By some Puritans inscrutable chisel.

Strange how scatology worms its way

To the heart of the liturgical space

As though profanity were the holier for sitting on it,

And shit sanctified by its surroundings.

He is offering a pleasing aroma unto the Lord:

So think his dogs.

Inspired by a misericord at St Marys church in Fairford, which shows a man

squatting and defecating with his two dogs on either side of him.


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Reaping

The labours of man are not a parable

Of sowing and reaping and tares;

The billhook is not sharpened

As a sermon exemplum.

They work back to back not because

They have quarrelled, but for plain support:

They have toiled since daybreak

And rain is coming.

In their stomachs: a rind of bacon

Hacked from a rancid flitch,

And bread of last seasons grain:

That not given in tithe.

Their eyes glazed, movements

Mechanical, bodies doll-like,

Not because they are caricatures

Chiselled by a carver:

They are rigid with fatigue.

Inspired by a misericord at St Marys church, Ripple, Worcestershire. The

subject matter of the misericords in this rural parish church is entirely

appropriate to its setting, and the carvings are in themselves a source for social

history.


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The Green Lady

Her head is a wedge, a spatula,

The irascible face of a Cycladic sculpture

Crudely hacked in Norman stone.

Her arms become a near tyranny

Of geometry. Her breasts are worn away,

The zigzags invaded by green.

Her legs, foreshortened, are spread

In giving birth to no child,

But to tendrils, trefoils crassly carved.

There are traces of paint

Which might have lent

Certainty to the image:

Proclaimed her Goddess

Or Virgin

Or wanton woman.

Dip the scallop in

And dredge up

Shining water,

Or a scum

Of algal bloom.

Michael Dames (The Silbury Treasure, 1976) sees the figure on the font at

Winterbourne Monkton as the harvest divinity performing the pre-Christian

miracle. He also sees a triple horn hair arrangement possibly a faint echo of

the ox goddess, interprets the kink in her arm as a sickle, and assumes thatthe zigzags are the symbol for water. None of these elements seem particularly

obvious to me, much as I could wish it to be so. The spread legs and the

vegetation, however, are undeniable, and suggest a comparison with the

equally enigmatic figure of the Sheela-na-gig: an odd choice for a carving on a

receptacle designed to contain baptismal water for the washing away of

original sin. It is certainly amusing to think that the carver may not have been

very effectively Christianised, and it is pleasantly perplexing to wonder why his

patrons approved the image. Dames is perhaps on firmer ground when he is

exploring the etymology of the name of the local river: the Kennet, or Cunnit a derivation shared with a once wholesome and now much-maligned word.


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The Canny Cockerel

Twas in the witching hour before the sunlight fills the skies

When cocks bid their masters all to wake and to arise,

A bat flew, leathern winged, through the henhouse door,Grappled with the cockerel and shagged him on the floor.

Alack! cried the cockerel, Oh! I am seduced!

What kind of offspring will we have produced?

The cock went cackling away through the sleepy town,

Singing, Cock-a-doodle, tie your willy down!

The cockerel laid a leathern egg, wrinkled and grey;

There he sat until a serpent frightened him away.

Broody sat the serpent, fattened up with mice,And, horror of horrors, hatched a cockatrice!

The cockatrice cried, Mother!, laughing her to scorn,

Turn to stone to atone that I was ever born!

A serpent made of granite was all they ever found,

So sing, Cock-a-doodle, tie your willy down!

Gallus Caput, drunken fool, fond of wine and beer,

Bore a cock upon his head, his faithful Chanticleer.

He boozed in the public house, with his loud coxcomb;Gallus guzzled ale and the cockerel pecked the foam,

When in burst the landlord, loudly he did moan,

Woe is me! A cockatrice has turned my wife to stone!

Now you must keep your beak shut, said Gallus with a frown,

But the cock cried, Cock-a-doodle, tie your willy down!

They bustled into the yard, the moon shone pale and wan,

A fetid stench filled the air where cockatrice had gone.

The cockatrice hides in the byre, slyly he gloats;When they see the landlords wife, gall rises in their throats:

Her distaff poised in her hand, stony strands of thread -

Gallus cries with anguish, filled with mortal dread.

The cockatrice, he chuckles, Ill turn em all to stone!

Clucking, Cock-a-doodle, tie your willy down!

The cockatrice leapt from the byre, eyes afire with rage.

Brazen then the landlord the monster did engage:

Your giblets will I gralloch! defiantly he cried -The words barely left his lips, for he was petrified.


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With wails of perturbation, craven Gallus fled,

Taking refuge in a wood (he left the town for dead).

When all were turned to coldest stone, the monster sought the clown,

Crying, Cock-a-doodle, tie your willy down!

The monster tracked him through the wood until the witching hour -

It turned each towringtree to rock, it trampled evry flower -

Gallus, panic stricken, Chanticleer implores:

Keep your silence, cockerel! This, Chanticleer ignores.

He squawks, My noble master is not afraid of you!

Come over here and he will turn you into chicken stew!

At last the cringing Gallus the cockatrice has found,

Cackling, Cock-a-doodle, tie your willy down!

Gallus Caput is kaput, a monolith he stands,

A phallic granite bauble held between his hands,

Chanticleer flies from his head, wondring whats amiss;

Little knows the cockatrice this is his nemesis:

For cockatrices all must die when the cockerel crows -

He screeches then as through the trees the waxing sunrise glows.

Chanticleers voice echoes through the woods all round;

He chortles, Cock-a-doodle, tie yourwilly down!

The cockatrice he blenches, his sanguine comb goes pale,

His stricken cry now echoes over field and dale.

His bloodshot eyes bulge in his skull, he teeters and falls,

And proudly strutting Chanticleer fills woodland with his calls.

The dimwit cock crows on and on for all that he is worth:

And so it seems that bats and cocks shall inherit the earth!

Yet still the cock addresses bat with imbicilic frown,

Crying, Cock-a-doodle, tie your willy down!

Inspired by accounts of the cockatrice in the mediaeval bestiaries. Illustration:

a cockatrice at Middleton Cheney church, Northamptonshire.


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Ostrich

Omnivorous ostrich,

Cloven of hoof:

Cast-iron stomach,Crazed yet aloof,

Shod like a camel

That longs for the sky,

Plumed like a falcon,

Yet too plumb to fly.

Oblivious ostrich,

Chained to the land:Iron in your guts

And head in the sand,

Bird, you dont function

According to plan:

In this, you have much

In common with man.

The rather goose-like ostrich carved on the supporter of a misericord inStratford-upon-Avon is based on the mediaeval bestiaries, and ultimately on

Pliny. Ostriches were described as cloven footed like camels, and were believed

to be capable of digesting iron hence the horse-shoe in the bill. This poem

was also inspired byHugh de Fouilloys twelfth centuryDe Avibus (The Book of

Birds), which affirms that the ostrich has plumage similar to that of a falcon,

yet lacks its ability to fly, and concludes that it is a symbol of the human being

who is too weighed down by worldly affairs to achieve the kingdom of heaven.

It is possible, however, that the ostrich at Stratford does not have a moralising

function, since it also played a role in heraldry.


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The Ape-Doctor Prognosticates his own Ruin

The pees the thing, wherein

Ill scry my own prognosis:

I dare not blench, but IMust face it: thrombosis,

Embolism, imbalance

Of one or other humour,

Spasms, syphilis,

Some tumid tumour -

Besides which, I have lately

Quaffed ale, and not a little:So I must needs die of pain

Or otherwise take a pittle.

The question is not

Ontological:

To pee, or not to pee?

The answers logical:

I need not fear the biteOf spider, or of adder:

The biggest risks

An impacted bladder.

In mediaeval iconography, an ape urinating or staring into a flask of liquid is a

satire on quack doctors, who set great store by the colour and opacity of their

patients urine as a means of diagnosis. Since the misericord in Stratford which

inspired this poem is close by the tomb of William Shakespeare, it seemed only

right to take the piss out of Hamlet.


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Lady Godiva

Lady Godiva

Rides on a stag

Bereft of a horseAnd wanting a shag

Not from a man

Mere object of scorn:

Lady Godiva

Needs a good horn

With more than one tine,

And preferably three:Two for her pleasure

And one for a tree.

Lady Godiva

Is calm and aloof:

You need not apply

Without cloven hoof.

Come, my good hart:You dare not deprive her,

Your antlers designed

For Lady Godiva.

Inspired by the supporter of a fifteenth century misericord, depicting Luxuria,

in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.


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Domestic Bliss

Youve got to see it from a dogs perspective

Or it all looks perfectly preposterous:

She lashed with her tongue, and heBeat with his birch and I, being

Ever-faithful to everywoman (and

Quite scared of her husband), bit

Where it seemed best, on the fleshiest

Part I could sink my teeth into (being

Inauspicously distanced from

His bollocks at the time). Meanwhile,

She had hold of the toe of his ridiculously

Outmoded boot and we three

Were wound into a wooden ouroboros,

An oaken sixty-nine-times-nine.

Peace! The charms wound up. It is

A respectable marriage, and shall be so

As long as the hound shall live.

Inspired by the supporter of a fifteenth century misericord in Holy TrinityChurch, Stratford-upon-Avon, close by Shakespeares grave may God never

rest his soul...


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Mask

To peel off an identity

and sling it on a hook

like a snake sloughingskin, or the flyleaf

of a book folded

over, disregarded

at the end of an act

discarding a fiction

and putting on a

fact is an awful

metamorphosis

from seedling into

germ: grimly

receding from

butterfly to

worm.

The misericord supporter from the choir of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford

may testify to the influence of drama in that town well before the birth of its

most famous inhabitant.


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The Devil Defaced

Fools! To think that I am any the less potent

for being sawn-off! Face up to it youll only

fail in efforts to curtail my majesty. Youll comefawning back when you need favours.

Flog yourself, pray for some portent,

flay flesh, bag my effigy in a basket: I

forget nothing. I can hear your heart

fluttering. I know youre only saving

face.

It is likely that this fifteenth century misericord from Stratford was mutilated

by Puritan iconoclasts. If so, this would seem to cast doubt on the idea that the

sculpture represents the decapitated head of a hunted animal in a rush basket,

for a Puritan would have far more reason to censor an image of the Devil. There

are two other representations of horned men amongst the Stratford

misericords.


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A Working Marriage

Time was, we had a double sleeping bag

And kept each other warm. Now winter

Worms its way to the bone, and we lieSide by side, like swaddled slugs: him

Still buttoned up to his Adams apple,

And as for me, my garment does

For any hour, or weather. You tell me:

Is that a switch of leather he uses

To keep my distaff raised, and spindle

Working when my eyelids droop?

Is his left arm poised to strike, or

Does he have a loop of twine

About his hand, winding it in rhythm

With my own? He is broken: it

Shall not be known, not until

Judgement.

We had ways more meet than spinning

To keep away the cold. Now we stay up

Half the night: separate, upright, old.

This fifteenth century misericord at Stratford-upon-Avon is one of several

which depict relationships between men and women. All of the others are

scenes of domestic disharmony.


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The Unicorn and the Loathly Lady

Honour is harder for the fair

To maintain - though to me

It always seemed strangeTo set such store by a thin

Membrane - and yet it draws

Me like a lodestone:

Virginity bids me lean

My head upon her lap

And think of nothing.

This one is loathsome

In her aspect: I amThe only fair thing

To have lain between

Those legs, and I scorn

Her taste in millinery.

No doubt such lack

Of panache is why

Shes still intact: and so

My cloven tracksLead here, and then

Leave off. His spear

Brings out blood

And water: a brutal

Knight and his ugly

Virgin daughter.

This fifteenth century misericord from the parish church in Stratford-upon-

Avon shows a scene commonly described in the mediaeval bestiaries: aunicorn, which is too fleet of foot to be trapped or killed by more honest

means, is attracted to the lap of a virgin, where it sits mesmerised until it is

killed by a knight, who transfixes it with a spear. The bestiaries go on to

compare the killing of the unicorn with the death of Christ. Given that this

carving is just across the choir from Shakespeares grave, it seemed appropriate

to allude to Hamlets words to Ophelia in the play scene.


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The Dominion of the Horn

When first they came to birth

And were chained to flesh and earth,

They envied the brave ratAnd the hearing of the bat:

Theyve adored since they were born

The dominion of the horn.

And when that they were growing

And they heard the bulls a-lowing,

They gave thanks for beastly rat

And the flutter of the bat,

And the staggering of the fawn:The dominion of the horn.

When it comes to confirmation,

Seduced by War and Nation,

They poison the poor rat,

And shoot arrows at the bat:

They revile and hold in scorn


And when they are ordained

And the ways of State ingrained,

They vilify the rat

And they crucify the bat,

And call us Satans spawn:


Inspired by a fifteenth century misericord at Stratford-upon-Avon, which

depicts a benign-faced demon with a bulls horns and bats ears.


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The Bridled Scold

When the Apostle scorned the tongue

He showed he was a man

Who, preferring sharper weapons,Wrote the Law, imposed the Ban,

Knowing hed be stung

If he let the mouth be nimble,

So he stopped it with a bung

And enslaved us with a thimble.

So now he sits at home,

Indomitable, idle,

And I never will be doneWith champing on his bridle:

Hes only satisfied

With something in my mouth,

Im meant to be his bride

And all I say is Mmmmth...

Mediaeval misericords often exploit a misogynist iconography. Common

themes include the dishonest ale-wife, carried off to hell by demons for sellingshort measures of ale, the woman being led into hell by demons or a pack of

apes, the pair of gossiping women with an eavesdropping demon behind them,

the virago belabouring her husband with a distaff, and most vicious of all

the bridled scold, as on this fifteenth century example from Stratford-upon-

Avon. There is no way of mitigating the distastefulness of these carvings for a

modern audience; they were doubtless designed in order to dissuade the

celibate clergy and religious from thinking about the attractions of marriage,

and there can be little doubt that they drew upon the Pauline epistles for their

inspiration.


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The Sower

... would no more let the tares grow with the wheat

Than bid the wolves rip out his own throat: he weeded

Them up with a vengeance, knowing each seedlingThat died deprived of light was one step closer to death

For his own children; one stalk of flax that bent

Beneath a spike of sow-thistle was one less

Thread to weave a shroud.

Watch him, with his crowd

Of witness-rooks, the only thieves

He willingly feeds, knowing, by the gnawing

Of his belly, he will stealTheir fledglings

In the morning.

His horse is growing old,

And knows, yet has no strength

To heed the warning.

Inspired by a late fifteenth century misericord in St. Marys church, Ripple,

Worcestershire: part of a series depicting the Months Labours. The scene forMarch shows a man sowing and harrowing. Rook fledglings have long been

eaten by the poor of the parish; indeed, many an ancient tree beside a manor

house has been allowed to reach a stately age because it has provided a

nesting-place for rooks, and a ready source of protein for those whose lives

hovered perpetually on the edge of destitution. The writings of Richard

Jefferies make it clear that this state of affairs applied as much in the late

nineteenth century as it did in the fifteenth. For this reason, too, country folk

have long held that it is only reasonable to expect a seedling from one seed in

every four that are sown: One for the mouse, one for the crow, one to rot andone to grow. Of those that grew, the farmer could expect at least ten per-cent

to be taken away as tithes for the church, before the Lord of the Manor made

his own demands.


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Unicorn

What duplicity led you

To desert some virgins

Tense betraying thighAnd do battle with this lion

And with what motive?

To plunder the narwhals tooth

That cleaves like a javelin

Between your bulging eyes,

So that it might be ground

To aphrodisiac, pulverisedTo neutralise all poisons

Except enmity, against which

There is no antidote?

You must have been suborned.

Ah! No! You were goaded

To distraction by the choker

Round your throat:

That cruel, constricting Crown.

Inspired by a heraldic unicorn in Binsey Church, Oxford.


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The Bellows

I have mastered thefundamentals of the art

Of promoting the belch and augmenting the fart:

For there are more gluttons, rakes and drunksAmongst a choir of holy monks

Than anywhere else in Christendom.

Stop braying a moment and listen:

Do me the favour of bending down

And wipe away that mulish frown:

I used a monkish tincture

To anaesthetise your sphincter,For devils galore God rot em

Have possession of your bottom.

God knows, theres no cure for despair

But enemas of cleansing air,

So hold your breath, prepare your gorge

For hot wind from a blacksmiths forge.

And put a brave face on it, I sayOr half a millennium from today,

Folks will tilt their heads, and say,

Good gracious, what is it, pray?

A demon exorcised by gas

Or nothing but a windy Ass?

Most authorities state that this fourteenth century misericord from Great

Malvern Priory represents a monk expelling a demon by blowing air up a mans

bottom with a pair of bellows. This seems a rather unsatisfactory explanation,given that the man clearly has the ears of an ass. Either the man is himself a

demon, or and this conclusion seems much more sensible he is an ancestor

of Shakespeares Bottom. This hypothesis is supported by textual and

iconographic evidence. The word fool is derived from Old French, meaning

"madman; insane person; idiot; rogue; jester," but also "blacksmith's bellows."

The ultimate derivations are the Latin follis ("bellows, leather bag"), which

came to mean a "windbag, or empty-headed person", and the Sanscrit "vatula"

("insane," literally "windy, inflated with wind.") More compelling still is the

iconographic evidence of a pair of sixteenth century painted wood corbels fromGoslar, Germany, which depict a demon fool (with a face in his bottom, webbed


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feet, and a coxcomb on his head), preparing to insert a pair of bellows up the

bottom of a woman who pauses at her work with a pestle and mortar to lift her

skirts and expose her buttock. (See Ana Maria Gruia, Fools, Devils and

Alchemy: Secular Images in the Monastery, Studia Patzinaka 6, 2008, Fig 10)

This would suggest that the image of the bellows inserted up the anus was anaccepted visual shorthand for the transference of foolishness. The question

may be asked why such an image would be deemed acceptable in the heart of

the liturgical space of a priory church. The answer is simply that even the

mediaeval religious did not regard such coarse humour as taboo, and self-irony

was not beneath them. The carving may even have served as a warning,

couched in humorous terms, to the faithful brothers: dont fill each other up

with the hot air of idle gossip, or you will merely pass your foolishness on to

others.


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The Trouble with Regicide

Cats! Cats! Cats! Cats

Make dogs look chic: they live on sprats

And pilchards, so bad breathHaunts them: its the bane of rats,

Who despise the slitted menace

Of their eyes, and how death

Reeks in their fur, their pee,

Their noisome scats.

And when they yowl,

Its worse than any demons howl,

Caterwauling down the valleyOf death. Youd think that they

Had something really wise to say,

The way they screech it in

The alley. No wonder we desert

To galley, schooner, sloop and junk.

Think of all the rats whove sunk

On reefs and drowned:

They did that

Simply to

Escape

The Cat.

But we, the remnant, done with

Bolting, scurrying, scarpering,

Turning tail, will not resort

To sail and sea and certain

Shipwreck. Were revolting.

He thinks himself the king

Of all the minor beasts

Then let him swing, and we

Will lead the world

As regicides

Before

He rips out

Our insides!


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How quaint it seems! Of its own volition

Our prey has lynched the competition.

We hoot in triumph one round vowel

No gallows ever held an owl!

This fourteenth century misericord from the priory church at Great Malvern is

one of many examples of the late mediaeval taste for inversion and the semi-

ritualised overthrow of authority, but unlike many others, the supporters of

the misericord hint that misrule only ever has the briefest of reigns. Apologies

to Robert Browning.


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The Mermaidens Reverie

There are some among the merfolk who believeIn men. It is claimed that they have mastery

Of the land, live a hundred miles from sea,

And never parch never drop a scale or desiccate

And that they walk upon the ground, not like

Crabs, but two-legged, scuttling with a forwards

Motion. They scorch the land, and rape

The ocean. Fearing water, they ride, but do not

Tame it, on planks of wood, weirdly crafted. They kill

Everything that moves, except for mermaids,Whom they abduct, if ever they catch them.

It takes a blink to kill them; nine months

To hatch them. They make mirrors, and comb

Their weed as we do, but never search

Their souls too deeply, for fear of finding.

Its even said theyd stoop to kill a whale:

Surely, an old fish-husbands tale.

Mediaeval mermaids were invariably depicted with a mirror, and sometimes

also a comb: symbols, the Bestiaries claimed, of their vanity. Mermen were also

sometimes depicted, holding stones and with violent faces. The pictured

example is on a fifteenth century misericord in Highworth Church, Wiltshire.


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Churchyard Blackbird

Black and haloed, my spiller of gold,

Stark and hallowed as a gilded ghost,

Raptured rhymer of the honeyed throat,

Pert proclaimer of embodied thought,

Spell me my tidings, cast my weird,

Illumine my way with a birdlike word

Sprung from the core of the yew's red root

Up through stone and your splayed foot,

In through your gizzard, gritted and green,

Out through your bill, yellower than grain,

Into the air, emblazoned with sun.

Sing and I live; fly, I'm undone.

Inspired by a blackbird singing in Uffington Churchyard, Oxfordshire.


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Paper Angels

Paper angels in the parish church

Sing like ghosts of insects

Escaping cocoons of tissue-shroud,

Scaling filaments of spider-web

Toward their vault of heaven.

Their antennae have looped themselves

And fused into haloes, as they rise,

Bleached mayflies in a nimbus cloud.

Sunlight tickles them into

Subsonic stridulations, glorying

In their metamorphoses, spiring

On glued and crumpled wings:

White imagoes on frames of wire

Surveying paradise with compound eyes.

Inspired by a display of paper angels at St Michael and All Angels Church,

Summertown, Oxford.


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An Alabaster Girl

Once, I think, she sat there,

Pallid as alabaster, where I glimpseHer now, through the time-warped

Window, cast in voluptuous stone,

And she was not a mirage

Among reflected oakleaves

And tombstones in the gloom

Of yews, her beauty gleaned

Through runnels in the glass

But a breathing girl, leaving

Trails of lovers, blushingAt the living rustle of her gown.

I lean inward, breath

Hazing the glaze, and she seems

To raise a pale forearm to brush

Away some wayward, untamed tress

Long gone. A blackbird sings;

The scene dissolves, like swirls

In melting

Honey.

Inspired by the monument to Jane Pusey, in Pusey Church, Oxfordshire.


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Painted Glass

Five centuries have blotched a patina

Of algae across their faces. The eyes,

Though blemished, join mother, child

In a gaze that seems eternal.

Watch now: a modernist painter

Working in wax repel it dries,

Mottled as alga; a coloured mould

Spreads like something elemental,

His pigments pure as glazes

And figures still arranged

Like puppets: Joseph, polite

Behind his pillar now crayoning

The ox, the ass, with hieratic gazes.

They crane their necks, unchanged

By centuries: the palette

Still as primary, her cradling

Quite as gentle.

Inspired by a stained glass window at St. Andrew's Church, East Hagbourne.


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The Tricephalos Surveys

The tricephalos surveys the choir

And congregation. Six eyes scour

Our souls and flesh for hope, desire,Faith and sin: these distinguish stone

From skin. Open, champing to devour

The meat that quivers on our bones,

Three mouths fixed in breathless groans.

Yet, when they die, our fleshly rich,

Divested of their wealth, say, Stitch

Me in a shroud. Sing masses to atone,

And sculpt my likeness here in stone.

Inspired by a corbel in the nave of St. Andrew's Church, East Hagbourne,

Oxfordshire.


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The Wilful

I have seen shades who will not lie down,

Not done with living nor content with dying,

Ready to rise at the least disturbanceOf their soil. Moles interrupt them

From the business of mouldering; worms

Channer without persuading them,

And when the thrushs thrum simulates

Rain, they reply with a breathless rapping.

Snow excites them to alertness

Like yuletide children who will not stay

Abed. And when the ground opensWith another yawning grave, they stand

Behind their tombstones, gaunt, lonely

Welcomers, like shadows at a housewarming:

Not long dead? You wont get used to it.

Yes, it seems so futile,

We know. Who says the fear of death

Expires with our last breath,

Or that the will to live is not eternal?

Inspired by nocturnal walks in Uffington Churchyard.


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In their time, they have stabbed

Backs, or laid schemes at beheadings,

Dreaming sharpened axe-falls

And laden, dripping baskets,

Their dark interiors twinklingWith drying dead-mens eyes.

IV

But in the grimmest churches

Where bodies are exhumed,

Transplanted, cold as organs

Packed in ice, the mothers

And the sisters, impotentAnd desperate, rack and rend

Their skins with airy nails,

And screech their searing

Separations in the visitors

Wan faces. Cock robins

Fall dead from the firmament,

Hearts torn by ghost-voices.

In the grimmest churches

The dead rage, clamour,Beseech, beckon, reach

To clutch you, hold

You to their red and

Beating hearts. Their fingers

Ring our fleshy throats

And clench on air.

Inspired by ghostly experiences in a number of British churches.


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Memento Mori

Bat-winged beneath, the skull will be

The last of the stone to weather away.

After the name and dates erode,

A corrosion of lichen crusts his cross

His words and deeds forgotten.

The last to rot beneath the earth

Is last to crumble, gouged in stone,

And someones lungs take in the breath

Breathed once by its carver. Bone

Is calcium. Flesh phosphorus. Stone

A breath in silica. A mans sweat

Once scoured those sockets -

Chiselled the intricacies of the teeth.

Perhaps he swore over them. All null

The life and deeds and cursing now

Save for the beauty of this skull.

Inspired by sculptured skulls on grave monuments at East Hagbourne Church,

Oxfordshire.


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Uffington Churchyard

Ill bear with death as a going to ground

A bunkering-down, an embracing of loam,

My skull in the yews root. Weeds on my mound

Are heralds bringing a prodigal home.

Ill rise as an umbel: white lacy flower

And tubular stem with tapering root,

And under my stone Ill gratefully cower,

Nourish the seed and furnish the shoot.

My coming home will be met by a host

Wholl rise from their graves on the night of my death.

Grass be my spirit, and nightshade my ghost,

And only the wind shall remember my breath.

But cut down these weeds and my seed cannot grow;

My coffined old soul will have nowhere to go.

Inspired by my memories of when Uffington churchyard was in all its former

glory. When I arrived in Uffington in 2006, the parish churchyard in summer

and autumn was a glory to behold. Parts of the meadow between the

gravestones had been allowed to grow unchecked throughout the year, and the

stones themselves stood in a sea of umbels and seeding grasses. Since then, a

new and stricter regime has converted the churchyard into a monotonous

lawn, and only the yews and the ivy on the gravestones remain as a reminder

that such places can be a haven for wildlife. Ironically, many churchyards in

the city of Oxford are better wildlife-refuges than those in country villages. I

should hate to be buried in a manicured churchyard where wildness was

banished beyond the lych-gate, but the thought of being buried where

wildflowers and trees are permitted to grow unchecked is one of the great

consolations of mortality.


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The Green Man

Shes loosened the teeth, shes blighted the lip,Shes turned his hand clammy. Her mouldering grip

Has scoured him and flensed him and left him aflush.Shes rendered him down and formed him afresh.Shes conscripted the maggot to fight as her own

And hes nibbled the green man down to the bone.

Shes rained on his grave, and over his nameThe lichens have crinkled and stolen his fame.Shes melted the liver, deflated the lung,Commanded the mole, and the guts are unstrung.Shes fashioned an awl of a sharp-pointed stone

And whittled the green man down to the bone.

In through the gullet, the tendril thrusts deepAnd whitened and wormlike while he is asleep,The rootlets seek flesh, weaving betweenThe fine-sutured fissures, embedded in green,

And out of the orbit the ivy has grown,Rooted through flesh and down to the bone.

She is his goddess; he is her slave;His ribcage her treasure, her temple his grave;

She is the worm and the yew and the skyWho bids him seize life and commands him to die.The sockets are empty; the flowers are blown

And winter has withered him down to the bone.

Inspired by a nineteenth century Green Man from Aston Tirrold Church,Oxfordshire.


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Inglesham

The mortar fell away, and the walls were heldTogether by palimpsests, the layers of plaster

And paint as resilient as the arches, and the LadyAnd Baby who once were worshipped, turnedAwhile into a scratch-dial, were translatedInside, and revered once more - not for divinity,But for the tenderness of her nurture. And whereThe Doom once preached in fresco, some rigidPuritan applied his Thou shalt nots, thenPerished and those too began to flake

Away. The box pews watched. The BibleOn the lectern summoned invisible fingers to flipBackwards to the first chapter of Ecclesiastes

And rested. Dust settled. The angels startled,

And like the mortar, fell away.

Inglesham Church is near Lechlade, in the Cotswolds.


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Angels of Eastleach and Hatherop

Love and money worked their willAnd chiselled out the angels, til

Rows of tombstones bore them: babesWith wings about the jowls, the gravesLong levelled, their inscriptions buriedUnder layers of loam. No one botheredTo excavate them after a century or so,

And then they suffered the moss to grow,And lichens blighted cheek and chin.Wet green ringlets began to spinTheir way downwards, past an ear;Even the hourglass was bleared

With growth. The sloth and sloughingOf natures ages was setting in.

An eye closed. A mouth began to grin.

Love and money worked their will,And smoothed the alabaster, tilThe breast seemed set to twitch, and breatheBeneath the linen. Lace at her sleeve,The bangle round her wrist, the wayThe bodice puckered, and the playOf glass-light on her rosary the art

Of Raffaele all suggesting that her heartMight beat again. Did her husband weepOver hands folded as if in sleep?

Was it his trembling finger lacedThe tasselled cord about her waist

And wept? The angels shuffled, creptOnto their pedestals. He closed the door,

And a wing smashed upon the floor.

The churchyard at Eastleach is full of old gravestones, nearly all of which are

carved with cherubic angels. Many no longer mark their graves, but are leanedagainst the church, and against the churchyard wall. Some are half-buried, andnearly all are covered with beautiful forests of moss and lichen. Only a coupleof miles away is the parish church of Hatherop, now attached to a school. Theside-chapel contains the sensationally dramatic, beautiful and expensive tombof Barbara de Mauley (1848), sculpted by Raffaelle Monti. Already, the right

wing of the angel at Barbaras feet has been broken, and at the time of writing,is lying in two pieces on the floor beneath the sculpture.


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Its Always the Horse

Its always the horse who cops itincidentally, in some harsh, hair-

raising cock-up, prey to a lance,a misfired arrow or a grim,clever engine of destruction.

Ywain is on a roll his opponentthree-fourths slain in his saddle and hot in pursuit of the soon-to-be-dead, when it happens:

They come to the castle gate;Ywain follows fast, irate

And wanting blood. The catch isA close-fitting portcullis,Tipped with iron and steel,

And sharpened wonderfully well,With, underneath, a mechanismFit to give an aneurismTo any knight, and impaleSomewhere between tail

And saddle, when the horseTrips the trigger. Of course,

Ywain goes unscathed, exceptfor those helpful spurs, whichare sheared straight through.

He dismounts, brushes himselfoff, and waits for his foeslady, wonders whether she

will be fit. His horse, bisected,sighs and dies. Cut that bit:

we want a PG certificate onthisone.

This misericord at New College Chapel, Oxford, mystifies modern viewers, butthe subject would have been instantly recognisable to the colleges firstscholars in the fourteenth century. The horse of Sir Ywain is shown trappedunder the portcullis of a castle belonging to the man Ywain has just dealt amortal wound in single combat. Relentlessly pursuing his dying foe, Ywaintrips a mechanism which brings the portcullis crashing down on his horses

rear end. The story originated in the WelshMabinogionin the form of TheLady of the Fountain, in which the protagonist was named Owain. From there,


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it migrated to France, and was adopted by Chrtien de Troyes in his Romanceof Yvian, or the Knight of the Lion. At last, the story made its way back toEngland, where it reappeared as the Middle English Ywain and Gawain, anabridged translation of Chrtiens French. It is this version which I have veryloosely paraphrased in the portion of my poem which is set in italics. The

picture is a digitally adapted version of a photograph by Alexander Watson.

Picture: Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford .


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The Hands of Cain: Kelmscott

Time, that old scavenger,has detached the hands

of men as foxes scatterskeletons. The Doom abovethe window is reducedto a knot of anguished feet.Only Adam and Eve surviveintact, the massacred innocentsdismembered in plaster.

Joseph watches wifeand son dematerialising:Mary is now one and a halfeyes, a single brow,the line of a face turned aside.

Hands reach out, beseechingOr embracing. Here, a spadehas vanished. His ochre haira flaring mane, his brotherprone and surrendered,his hands, tense in mime:

forever making murder.

The red ochre wall paintings at Kelmscott Church in the Cotswolds showscenes from the Old and New Testaments facing each other across the sidechapel, and a Doom above the window. An image of Adam and Eve is in a panelbeside the window. The New Testament subjects appear to be the Massacre ofthe Innocents and the Presentation at the Temple. One of the Old Testamentpanels may represent David and Bathsheba and another is a depiction of Cainmurdering Abel. They have been stylistically dated to no later than 1280.


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Angels and Elephants

The tower is Saxon; there are bits of itsalvaged from Roman ballisters, but folks

dont come for those. The whole navefrom font to altar is alive with leaves: oaks,vines, roses cucumbers. But its not thoseneither. Then theres the angels, archingoverhead like prows of ships, holdingshields and looking stern. No one gives ema second glance. Its the elephants,brought in by some cove I forgethis name from a Paris exhibition.Theyrepapier mach, not wood, orstone. They have a way of lookindown at you, like they was planninsomething. No one minds. I sposeat the last trumpet, when folks foiblesare rewarded, itll raise a laugh to say,I hung French elephants in anEnglish churchthatday.

St. Swithuns chapel in Wickham, Berkshire, is an extraordinary and somehow

whimsical blend of the Saxon and the Victorian. When the church wasextensively rebuilt by Ferrey in 1845, he filled it with glorious stonework andtiles decorated with foliage, and the spandrels of the nave are graced withangels. The north aisle, which houses the organ, was originally intended to bedecorated with additional angels, but Ferreys patron, William Nicholson,insisted on the inclusion of four enormous painted papier mach elephantsheads and had four more custom made for the purpose. Simon Jenkins, inEnglands Thousand Best Churches, Penguin, 1999, says that they rank amongthe sensations of English church architecture. It is hard to disagree with him.


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The Industry of Angels

There is no limit to the industry of angels.They stand sentinel above her canopy,

carved in dark wood. They cross featheredarms, wings interlacing, wearing crownsand copes. They parade in rows alongher sarcophagus, shielded, expressionless.They assemble in legions on the ceiling,or scramble like reptiles to lift her cushion,ungainly in devotion. She looks as thoughshe could bat them away any momentin a fit of annoyance, or berate themfor misarranging the garter about her arm.

They are well-trained; they do not look downbut ever outward: protective, solicitous,anxious. But in the bottom tier, her breastsbegin to rot in alabaster. Flesh shrinksabout her bones. The ball-joint of her shoulderbulges like a root. Her hands and feet witherforever. Her jaw sags, revealing teeth - eyesare not quite closed. The winding-sheethangs open like a sack. Stop. Lie downon the chancel floor beside her. Look up:

there's another one, fresh as fresco, afeathered angel, waiting until she wakes.

The tomb of Alice, Duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475) in St. Marys Church, Ewelme,Oxfordshire, is perhaps the most striking example of a cadaver tomb inexistence. It is overarched by a canopy decorated with stone and woodenangels. Alice herself is depicted on the top tier of the tomb, lying as if in prayer,

with angels supporting her cushions. Beneath her is the sarcophagus itself,suspended at waist-height, and beneath that, hidden in the shadows behind analabaster arched arcade which will barely admit a hand or a camera, is a

representation of her decomposing body, lying stripped to the waist in itswinding sheet. The contrast between the opulence above and the corruptionbelow is intentionally shocking. Casual visitors are likely to miss one further,extraordinary detail. On the bottom of the sarcophagus, immediately above theeyes and feet of the alabaster cadaver, there are beautiful, brightly colouredfrescoes, which can only have been painted before the tomb was assembled, asif for the stone corpses private viewing. The sheer beauty and terror of thisextraordinary monument is almost in danger of leading the visitor to forgetthat the whole church is extraordinary. There are funerary brasses on the floorsof the nave, and Thomas Chaucer, son of Geoffrey, is commemorated in brass

alongside his wife Matilda Berghersh. The side-chapel in which Alices tomb issituated (it divides this chapel from the chancel) is also richly decorated, with


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the IHS insignia painted all over the walls and the mediaeval wooden ceilingis likewise covered with carved angels.


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Why Do I Fear the Hydra?

Why do I fear the hydra, trawled upFrom the depths of cold unknowing?

I imagine it flapping, like a landedFish, and then recoiling, blenchedAs an octopus, its travails all feintsAnd wriggles, preparatory to striking.

The dragon-wings are less dauntingThan the rest of the creature, eachThroat whittled down to its trachea,

A writhing rope of malignity on whichA head whips about with ungainlyThreshings and belchings, and gnawsUpon the windpipes of its fellows.I see the ogling eyes, the gappedPegs that serve for teeth, and recogniseThem for old familiars. And whyDoes my eye flit back, time afterTime, to that flattened face ofLuxuria, with her horns, her hennin

Veil, and her wry and dimpledExpression? Its the way they all

Join at the craw, and how they

Take turns in throttling each other.

In this, they are not sins, but menWho kill the Lollard, fight the Turk,And with teeth lodged in his gulletForget he too is man, and brother.

Inspired by the central subject of a fourteenth century misericord at NewCollege Oxford, which depicts a Hydra with seven heads, representing theDeadly Sins. The ending of the poem makes reference to the Complaint of

Peace by Desiderus Erasmus (16th Century).


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Picture Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford.


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Pious Pelican

To allow your hand to be pinned to a boardAnd pierced by a nail when one quick call

To heaven could forestall it is one thing,

But to dig your beak so deep beneathThe feathers of your breast, and gougeLike a gimlet through all those striations

Of muscle is another. Only a parentCould pierce with such surgical precision

And not flinch, giving of blood and flesh

To the whole gasping progeny, and fill

Their sagging gullets with the iron wineOf love. You have to live to know it:

The way you would rip out your ownThroat, if you could reach it, and rend

Your heart, if you could bare it.

The mediaeval bestiaries asserted that the pelican mutilates its own breast inorder to feed its young with its flesh and blood, and equated this with thesacrifice of Christ. The pious pelican is consequently a comparatively common

element in church decoration of the Middle Ages, although the bird bears verylittle resemblance to its living counterpart, which could by no means penetrateits breast with its bill, no matter how hard it tried. This example adorns a hand-rest amongst the fourteenth century choir stalls of New College, Oxford.


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Picture Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford.


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Beak-Heads

Beak-heads ogle down on centuries of men,Watching maidens turn to mildew, and blacksmiths

Go to ground. They line up, champing the arch,Grinding it to roundness with gritted teeth.Some are half-dog, stone-slavering, faithful;Others snarl their claims to a dragons lineage,Coiling their unseen tails around roofbeams,Holding back the fire. At night, when the doorsClose, one slips out its basilisk tongue to lickClean its unblinking eye; another sidlesUp to a corbel, making obscene suggestions.Stone toenails scrabble in the moonlightBeneath the clerestory, tap-tapping on thePitted masonry. Sometimes, they fight.The nave is filled with unheard spittings

And snarls. They squabble until dawn, thenRetire, bug-eyed and inscrutable. A flower-Lady flusters with her duster. Their nosesDo not wrinkle. She stoops with her dustpan,Sighs, tut-tuts, scoops up a fallen scale.

Inspired by Romanesque beak heads and corbels at Avington Church,Berkshire.


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Green Men at New College

At New College, the Green Men have taken rootLike weeds, grown through opportunism, their seeds

Borne on a brisk wind before the rains. SomeAre kings, their beards forked in three locks,Moustaches hanging above resolute lips, leavesSpringing, like ideas, from the temples. One

Wears leaves trained up his cheeks, adjunctsTo his crown; another, older, is benign hisLeaves almost conceal his frown. This oneIs a joker, lolling his tongue: it germinatesInto a frond. There is even the Green-ManDunce, buck-toothed, blinded by his plethoraOf leaves. Some sprout no green of their own,But their crowns belie them. Then, there is the pairOf oak-men: the furrowing of their browsReleases an unfolding. Their jaws sprout

Acorns. That one smiles or is it merelyThat his eyelids and lips are tugged upwardsBy the optimistic green? This looks like a Saracen,His hair greased into tripartite curls, but heBreathes weeds. One smirks, wears his leavesLike handlebars another is sere with sorrow.They sprout from armrests, half choking,

Completely taken over by leaves that spurtFrom armpits, jowls, anywhere. Then there areThe leafy beasts, with gritted teeth. SomeOffer a token grimace. Others snarl. TheresOnly one who simply scares me. He fangs

A limp leaf that hangs in front, his faceFeral, his muzzle hiding gritted teeth.The leaves thrust upwards from beneathThe cheekbones; the hair coils. A pairOf claws clasps outwards at a strange

Angle, and the greenery itself is justCamouflage for those remnantsOf the reptile: scales, barely concealingThe sinews underneath. I stop.

The choir-stalls echo with the slantwise,Backwards-hacking laughter of the fox.

Inspired by carvings in the choir stalls of New College, Oxford, carved in thefourteenth century.


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Parish Ghosts

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