Saints on a Rood Screen Dado
You lie in an East wind
spinning off empty barley fields
in new pink saxifrage collar.
They can’t provoke some absences,
and where a master-stroke began
ends in precarious lines
(four are almost entire
some half there
some in a kind of limbo) –
I guess, through criss-crossed light
your bones are just that,
a life’s long pentimento
before your mouth enunciates
adjusting to casual quiet,
my near-future’s insidious whisper.
It’s like devotions real purpose
makes me a listening absentee,
there’s nothing but desirous colour
saying ‘Ambrose’, ‘Augustine’
‘Gregory’, ‘Jerome’,
or not ‘there’, but ‘everywhere’.