Canto I – The City

 “It will be well for those who seek the favour,
the comfort from our father in heaven,
where a battlement bulwarks us all.”

-        The Wanderer

Across the knolls and tors they

heeded this primal melody

and came with their young and

daubed ochre glyphs on crumbling

trunks and carved the throats of lambs

and ran the blood into the rivers and

built their forts and dams. The soil

curdled beneath their feet and eddied

stories in their nostrils and from these

first and oldest rites they gummed their piecemeal

god. The hares hastened their circles and watched

with glassy cosmic eyes as the flax and oak gave

way to turrets of limestone and mortar

and men abandoned their lyres for the truths

of bruised parchment.

There is a man – the land sees him

coddled in wax and shadows – with a

shaven pate and a dead graven god

swinging on a chain from his throat

who first recorded the riddles and

songs of exile, love and war. He breathed

in silence; perched on the bank

of a lake of words, watching the vowels

and consonants lap at the corners

of his thumb. The hares in all their clamour

could not fathom the clasped lips of

a tooth-and-tongue creature and leered,

perturbed, as the man dug furrows and

buried his hours in Matins, Lauds and Vespers –

this strangeness only had a voice

in the sibilations of a sharpened quill

and the trees ogled the hands

plucking thin black wasps

to mash in Arabic gum and pour

that sepia sea into his inkwell –  

a quiver full of kennings

worthy of Kinnewolf –

stealing those wanderers

from the jaws of eons, singing lays with

a seafarer’s lung. The local groves granted

chiselled boards to harbour these parchment planes

and the cobalt flax surrendered linen

to stab and seal its chains.

Hour after hour, season after season,

the man toiled and trimmed

and measured and thought and smiled

and died. The book passed hand by hand

until it nestled in the palm of the cleric

of the Confessor – there it remained –

cloaked and crowded on the Bishop’s shelf,

watching the bastard conqueror crack steel

knuckles upon the cathedral door. The angels

and cross-legged Kings split stony eyes

and wept hot mortar to see the book

of the silent man so loudly ignored;

cheap wine began to frill the pages,

a knife was sharpened upon its leather

edge, and the devil’s kiss of a sizzling poker

scorched the hours and days of the monk

into black ragwork scraps. Finally,

in search of a God without a mitre,

they dug in the dust and pig-skin

and proclaimed in fear at the sight of

poetry. Now, Pound and Tolkien can

roll their tongues over riddles and conjugations

and raise red blooms from black soil

and birth a new earth between the syllables,

and a glass-eyed child – clutching a brolly

and chewing his bunk – can stir his mouth

to Fairfax’s tree and talk the century

with a long-dead monk.

This portion was patient awaiting

the poor man’s laureate,

and the ravens chattered and purred

while Latimer’s ally gazed upon

the mad-rat hustings and noted

the manic exertions and chants

of a baying parliament of paupers.

Dickens had come

to jaunt the cobbles of Dumnonia,

and nestled himself, snug and heady,

within the skull of a Turk, sipping lush

and watching a muse slip into slumber,

his long cigarette slipping and probing

like a blazing antennae.

The writer lodged every glimpse

and murmur and passion and stench

and chronicled those motions

into the lines and ledger of his vision –

locked and bound and serialised

behind a pulp-and-paste door –

the ravens cawed and jeered at the man

who always left and always returned

and always asked of this faithful city

if he please may have some more.

Antiquarian, author, songwriter,

poet, priest, friend and fool;

Gould garnered so many names

that the earth forgot his first

and the hares stamped canyons

and spluttered lakes in their efforts

to affix a title to his shifting soul –

marching over the moor dropping names

like some mad Adam – penning hymns

and marking myths and dragging vrkolaks

and vlkoslaks from Satan’s drawer.

Stoker pressed his eyes

to every bracket and letter

of Devon’s mythmaker

in a fevered study of the madman

who first knew

the sting of the fang of Nosferatu.

Grass and gorse and jackdaw and flint

trembled and bit the earth, tightening

their grip on a rattling reality and snapping

their necks to watch bundles of steam

bulge from iron lips as carriages racketed

and raced across the melting ladders –

slowing, sauntering, simmering

to a halt by a man – fresh from tea

with the Queen of mystery.

The scutted temperament cannot conceive

the cleft within a mind devoid of tales –

the rushing tide of apathy

for an intellect craving

a single slice

of spined and jotted glory.

They marked the man, collared

and clad in clarity and missed

the moment – that precise pigment

of the psyche when the devil cries

and a brilliant notion yawps into life

like the cosmic engine of a well-oiled

comet; riddling sloth with bullets

and reminding Lane why he got

into the business of paper and ink

to begin with.

The rain giggled in sheets and rivers

and zipped and shuffled down the glass

in queues, scrumming its brothers

and sisters with all the gusto

of a far stronger current – the woman peered

and shivered within that warm harbour

of canned corporate jazz –

slumped in a café, keying accents,

slashing graves and poking trémas –

the waters mingled, ran and curled,

yucking and braying at a sight so tragic:

a student counting verbs

when she should be penning magic.

These rings and cycles tugged

and tore and those hindlegs ran and

ran some more – eternally in flux

and flex:

abiding, abiding, abiding

in that faithful fortress

on the river Exe.

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