At a church perched
above a Boscastle I sit
on a cracked
grave slab.
The crack runs across
the grave-resident’s chest;
it runs straight
through a line of chiselled script;
and part-way along the line
one cunt-lipped ivy-leaf stands
out proud from the crack’s dark.
A Kernow’s flag crackles
on the breeze scraping round
a Forrabury Church,
and the weathervane fish swims
its metal silhouette stuck still.
The four black nights
& one crossed-day
of Kernow’s cloth twitches
as countless molecules form
vortices across its texture.
I look seaward across
the top of a lop
-sided gravestone sinking in
to the hairy grass;
and beyond that grave’s tilt
other stones arranged
as cracks of solidity
interrupting space.
A Celtic cross & its four
holes, each to be kissed
by tongues of wind;
and perched on top:
a frayed black poppet
of a crow (as if placed
by some film director’s
penchant for cliché).
And as vast back
-drop a darkening sea-sky
with silvery chiselled
cloud-edges, and gulls
flashing their cross-bodies:
first of black against light
then of white against dark
as they swoop through
regions of ivory
-greys & slate-purples.
Now I stand
by a granite stone: shaggy
with chalk-green lichen. I stroke
my hand through the rough
growth, and feel
the cool wet of raindrops
the lichen has collected.
I watch drops roll,
and I remember
the straight black crack
on the grave-slab I sat
on some moment’s aeon ago.
if the slab
were (or is)
vertical
the lip
of the crack
could be clung
to with fingers
strong as
a rock
climber’s at
least for a
short while as
the ivy
lives rooted
in the black
of the gap
In amongst the tiny
lichen-tracery & erosion-swirls
on the slab’s surface
I now notice
red mites, bright
as planets the size
of one fourth of a
salt-grain, wriggle
with what look like
random trajectories.
One mite,
perhaps-accidentally, follows
one chiselled channel
of a letter why.
This could be or could
‘ve been or will
be read
as scrying; and the Y
can or could
be taken
as a stang.
I read
and take
nothing,
as a Kernow’s flag trembles
like a tongue
in some
eternity’s mouth.
Copyright © Mark Goodwin, 2011.
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