At the George and Pilgrim
The small man in jeans and fleece
at the bar; his white pony-tale,
his pink skin. He talks to me
when I order, again when I go,
looks too long and too close –
there is something bloodless,
something of the dry leaves
and deep grass about him.
I’m here because it is old,
almost five hundred years old,
I’ve read. It rented out beds
to the pilgrims who came for the Tor,
for the Abbey and Bridget’s poor chapel;
who walked after Patrick and David
and Gildas as though,
if enough people followed
all in the same line, if the right words
were said and right actions repeated,
a way might be worn
through this world to the next:
to the saints and the new shoots of Eden,
the lost and recovered dead.
And I walk behind them,
along the hard, bright afternoon:
up the Tor and back down,
in and out of the Abbey’s wrecked arches,
around its fish-ponds, herb garden,
its orchard livid with plenty and rot,
where a near-horizontal light
weighs the branches, and each step
brings the soft jolt of apples
collapsing sweetly underfoot.
(First published in Scintilla 18)