by Richard Greene
I
One lifetime keeping the roof-beams and slates up
Over how many lifetimes of Common Prayer
And Sarum Rite? Under-foot, manorial
Dust of those who owned village and shire;
In the Chapel some pious barbarian
Stretched out with his blade and bride,
Retelling for a thousand years in stone
Tales of Saladin and Christ’s Sepulchre.
The windows make anthology of lives
Given to small mercies and steady trade:
Zacchaeus called out of the tree by bequest
Of an attorney; the coiling dragon
And St. George sacred to the memory
Of a colonial brigadier; Mary
Magdalene breaks perfume on holy feet
Remembering a cornfactor’s widow;
In the churchyard, lives less prosperous
Grow illegible under rain and moss.
Curate or curator, the priest among stones
Serves the dead parish more than the living.
II
But it would have answered something
In the scholar’s life to go over wholly
To the dead. The dark hours in Duke Humfry’s
Turning over folios, where lives were hidden
Among transcriptions of faded tombstones
In the County Histories of England.
And in the Upper Reading Room, always
Yellow pages of Tonson and Lintot,
The voices of poets who lived only in
The hearing, gave their dusty lives once
Or twice in a generation to some
Reader who called them out from the closed shelves.
III
It was a thing that I almost wanted –
Priest of the Church of England, as I had
Failed to become one in the Church of Rome.
This was to be the unturning of paths
That turned. No longer “ours” but my own,
And yet bound by that imagined self
I could neither inhabit nor escape.
In the damp and cold of December
I sat by the small fire in a chaplain’s
Rooms, and wept for something in myself
That now I cannot name. It was desire
Or it was mourning. It was, I think,
The shadow of a hill thrown forward
Onto level ground, the illusion of ascent.
IV
He sent me to the Bishop, whom I could
Not call “Milord,” and then to a Canon
Who thought me suspect because foreign,
And challenged me: “Why should you be ordained
And a woman not?” I bought approval
When I said, “I honour martyrs but wish
They had lived.” It was sufficient, after all,
And he would have backed me, but without
Enthusiasm — though what he did not hear
In me I heard, a way with mysteries
All too practiced, too polished, and too glib.
V.
After two years, I tried it all again,
And I took my oath before a new Bishop
To live as an Anglican – a ritual
Out of a ring-binder, coyly phrased
So not to repudiate old loyalties
Or to offend against ecumenism —
This at St. Mary the Virgin, under
Newman’s pulpit, and before the chancel
Where they tried Henry’s Bishops over bread
And sent them to the flames in Cornmarket Street.
And yet in that church, the best of witnesses
Were the unremarkable living – the casual
Vicar, who noticed me confused
On my first Easter night, handed me a bell
And nudged me when the moment came to ring.
VI
Often, week-day Evensong at Christ Church,
The boy-angels lifting the Psalms with voices
That rose towards vaulted shadows and glass,
And the clergyman listening to his hand
For the true note a tuning fork made.
On a pillar opposite my usual pew,
The empty eye of a tiny carved skull
Held my own and pulled me back from Purcell’s
Heaven with ordained thoughts of what was gone,
Who had sung and listened, who had vanished
From this place in its thousand years of chanting.
But against all that weight of memory
I set the cold afternoon in Tom Quad:
Staring into Mercury Pool, my daughter
Leaned forward and fell among the fat carp.
Instantly, I snatched her from the water
And saw running towards us a black gown
And a flapping bath towel — a theologian,
Fifteen years later to be Archbishop
Of Canterbury, on his way to do a kindness.
VII.
I saw him staggering in a lane beside
The Bodleian, the finest poet
I will ever know, lost in a place where
He had spent half his life. “Peter,” I called.
He knew my voice and answered without looking
Towards me, “Richard,” he said, “ I have
Gone blind, temporarily, from eyestrain.
I need to buy shoelaces in the Turl.
Walk with me.” So I brought him to the shop
And left him there, though he seemed surprised
That I would desert him at a bad moment.
I had somewhere to go, an appointment
With the curate who was my counselor –
We were talking our way towards vocation.
So I left Peter there groping along
In the quest for shoelaces, yet remember
Nothing else of that day but the poet
Standing in a doorway . I did not see him
Again. The day changed nothing, of course,
But it tells me how the ambition
Ended. Soon, my prayer soured and I could think
Only of death, something in myself
That I turned from, another calling that
Certainty would kill. I made my excuses,
Problems of finance and citizenship,
And closed the book on the matter of England.
