“here is the church here is the steeple / you were looking for saints but you only found people”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, some self-indulgence. Cut for length:

Cathedral Close, Larry Hammer

Too close, and you see nothing—old
        pale limestone, quarried
    with smoothness rocks forget
and fleck to worn grains, weather-worried
        and rough to hold
    against your palm. And yet

too far, you see too little—a view
        to quickly seize,
    a glimpse from busy streets
of towers over ragged trees
        dimmed distant blue.
    Within the cool retreats

behind the Bishop’s Garden wall,
        gazebo-caught
    the fullest prospect waits
for you. One glance can hold what’s sought,
        a sight of all,
    how everything relates:

grey walls held straight into the sky
        on buttress wings,
    the steep roofs, sunlit spires,
eaves decked with dark grotesques—hard things
        distorted, wry—
    deep lines the eye admires.

And yet this too is ineffective.
        The hedge below
    screens off the people drawn
around the base, so there is no
        clean perspective
    and sense of scale is gone.

To feel the power, pass inside
        the porch with its
    tympanic tracery,
through transept, past the piers that sit
        on either side
    bearing weight to free

the crossing. Stand where the marble floor
        casts echoes through
    the choir and down the nave,
and see, beside a darkened pew,
        how narrow four
    widths seem against the cave

of height, how low the vaulting looks
        compared to files
    of length. Bedecked and dashed
with carver’s craft, the chapels, aisles,
        and covert nooks
    lie in soft light that’s splashed

charismatically in stained cascade
        upon the tall
    hue-consecrated stone.
But still you cannot grasp it all
        until you’ve strayed
    before the altar. Atone:

go where the distant abstract rose
        bestows the only
    illumination, where
you stand in chancel shadows, lonely.
        When your breath slows
    look up and wait. From there,

the large cathedral’s darkly made,
        but at the rail
    the whole inside’s in view
and you can apprehend the scale
        of light and shade,
    of solid stone and you.


First drafted in my mid-twenties after hiking through slot gorges in Canyonlands National Park, based on memories of growing up a 10 minute walk from the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and revised over the next decade (after a visit to confirm details).

---L.

Subject quote from Best Guess, Lucy Dacus.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Too close, and you see nothing

An excellent beginning and play upon the title!

eaves decked with dark grotesques—hard things
distorted, wry

I like that a lot. And the rhyme of ineffective / perspective.

Thanks for posting it!

[larryhammer]

Thankee.

The title plays off that line, though, rather than the reverse -- I only hit upon that title last year.

[swan_tower]

It took me until now to excavate this tab and copy your poem into my notebook, but thank you for self-indulgently sharing it! The rhyme scheme is graceful enough that I didn't even notice it at first. This isn't a set form, is it -- just something you adopted for the poem at hand?

[larryhammer]

Yup, a nonce form. I remember it taking a while till I finally hit on rhyming longest lines with shortest lines, but once I did the swinging balance really clicked.