1.

The unchronicled ones.

The patron saints of nothing.

               (There are only so many things

               in the world, after all,

               no end of sainthood… )

                              Saints without portfolio

or name. The ones who stayed,

who prayed themselves away

               into invisibility,

               into merging with the things

               they prayed among.

                              The ones found late

by small things likewise

un-regarded, things that time

               tips gradually, as grass slopes

               to the cliff edge, steepening,

               to the verge of nothingness,

                              of vanishing

into these distances, these mists.

The patron saint of gun emplacements,

               of the wooden crematorium,

               of the abandoned lime kiln,

               of the rusted pulley, of the first

                              lost radar blip.

Because even a thing

can be saved, not for eternity

               maybe – who wants that? –

               but for its absolute

               moment in if not your

                              then in God’s attention.

Remember the small saints

and they might pray for us.

2.

The patron saint of radar

has only one thing to say
and he says it again and again.

And he listens. Sweeps the sky,

sweeps he might say heaven,
with his readiness to hear.

That is where the sainthood lies.

Not in the one-syllable sermon –
no word on earth could be that wise,
no alphabet could hold it –

but in the listening.

3.

                  The wonder is not

in the one scattered radar blip that returns

with the world-changing Yes!

like Noah’s dove

                   but in the great diaspora

of millions who never write home,

of whom no stories are told,

but who become

                   pinpricks of presence,

drops in the sea of space, stray punctuation

in that dark-glittering text beyond

our understanding,                              
who might speak for us there.

4.

That seagoing, storm-driven scatter of saints

all round the snaggle-toothed Atlantic seaboard,
along the Celtic Sea, on the storm petrel’s road

to the North… And their landfalls…
No wonder the least of sea-stacks,

in certain turns of the soul-weather,
would see them flocking, shipwrecked, castaway,

small saints as dense as seabirds on the cliffs,
as fulmars, guillemots, kittiwakes, terns,

on the wind-shuddered ledges, just over the spray zone,
so many.  You could mistake their prayers,

as we mistake the melee, the flak, the thrill
of gull-cries,
                    for cacophony.

5.

       The patron saint of the gun
        never fired in the anger
        had a boom in his voice,
a massive cast-iron peacefulness
which could shake you to the bones.

       Even now, even more so,
       his dismembered torso
       too heavy to lift – no
scrap man equal to the job –
sinking into the turf, rusting to match

       the wave-slapped rock
       above the tideline, yolk-
       yellow lichen blooms
like centuries-long shells ex-
ploding, possibly for ever, in the night

       of history. His mouth is open
       for the wind to breathe him:
       at some angles it’s a distant
plainchant, others, it’s an organ pipe.
His silence, though, the grandest thing of all.

6.

The way of lichen
lies low to the rock,
becoming almost rock itself,
if there was rock that grows.

Tar lichens, verrucaria, like oil spill,
like a shadow of the sun-bright
glorious puddles and stains
of, oh, xanthoria…

(This is a canticle already,
how the scribes of taxonomy
burst into Latin, how the waves
reach up and shatter into mist

around you.) The order
of the black, the gold, the grey,
the white-apparelled zones.
Lichen, making a living

from nothing, more ascetic
than the sea pinks clinging
in their crumbling grit. Oh,
fruticose, foliose, leprose:

lichen litanies again,
in a bass key – each a hard
accommodation, fungus to algae,
intimate, inseparable,

a treaty signed under fire
from weather, wind and wave-lash
or you could say equally
the toughest sort of love.

More patient than we can imagine,
such a mighty lowness.
Get down on your knees.

I don’t know where
the way of lichen leads,

but it starts here.

7.

The Tao of driftwood…

       It was time to let go
of the earth, root hairs relinquishing
their hold, each one a wince of parting

       then the odyssey,
the restless landfalls, stripped bare
by the shingle, the heave and haul back

       to waterlog and wallow.
Then slowly, in the tide’s long dandling,
rocked like a baby into agelessness.

       Now, washed up, salt
frost in my pores, look, I’ve grown silvery,
half mineral, beyond decay.

       What next? Only fire
can move me on from here, released
in a crackling flare to smoke, to soot,

       to a brief pulse of light
you might catch by chance across darkening
miles of sea. You might not sleep, that night.

8.

                            The gull flock, all and all together
riding backwards on the tide run folding round the point,

                     backwards but facing forwards,
always to the wind which is the cardinal direction – living

              between two flows, sea and sky,
in ever-readiness to trade one for the other, to step up

       into the wind which must be counter – forget
‘going with the flow’ – to get a grip, to lift them into flight.

9.

A psalm, for once, to pandemonium,
the smash and clangour of the gull-flock’s outcry overhead… We’re staggered, half-stunned

in the crossfire – the sky, the soundscape,
comes crashing around us like a landslip.
We are struck dumb. It passeth understanding.

Praise it, then – each scream, swoop, beak-gape
of the swirl-storm, the swordplay of wings,

is a well-tooled sign – alarm, alert, sound
of boundaries ripping, meshed, pulled taut
as cheesewire, tensioned like a geodesic dome

but living – sinews of the sound-scrum tight
and bristling, a barbed wire entanglement

of glorious din. Look up, this is closer to the face
of God than we are, the high engineering
of flock-mind in flight. Praise them,

the stevedores who swing and hoist its ringing
girders, balancing on nothing but momentum
as they hammer them, deafening us, into place.

10.

The dank and air-shuddering dark of the cave
       won’t wear just any story.
You might have to breathe, to chant, to sing

tale after tale, a whole whispering gallery,
       before you hit the pitch
that comes alive, that fills its lungs,
       to boom, to after-hum,
to go on tingling in your rib cage long

after the word washes back into sea-swash
       and the skreel of gulls
that, again, as ever, go air-fencing up,
       above and at you off the cliffs.
That’s how you come to leave old Cadoc,

sour power-voice, caller-in of curses,
       the unequal equal of kings,
to his more than equal silences
       here in this angular gape,
this dark innards, this gullet, this shaft

where the sky pours in over its crumbling
       brink: a sheer fall
into, he might have said, illumination
       even as the rising tide
conspires to close the cave’s mouth.

When it ebbs, you will find no one. Only
       his voice, echoing.

11.

The way the sharp edge
in a fipple-flute mouthpiece breaks the flow
into coherent shiverings we finesse,
breath by breath, into tune,

the island, chunked-off,
random-canted by its rucked-up strata,
cuts vibrations in the wave-field.
Here, Saint Synaesthesia

perceives the trouble of it all
as music, the heave of the incoming tide
as basso profundo, a gong-like,
a bone-tingling, drone

split by the just-bared
dogs-tooth rocks off Lighthouse Point
into eddies, twists and tide-rips
of polyphony. She feels

the wave-break torn
along the West shore’s deckled edge
as inflammation in the estuary’s
tender flesh. She sees

the sound of an East wind
shot through with stainless-steel glints,
the North wind as wavering sheets
like an infusion of aurora,

the South-West a familiar
peach-cream blush that pearls your skin
unbeknownst; the one from no
direction but the past,

a scent that aboundeth
with burnet, wild thyme and other aromatic plants.
Her one prayer is for there to be
a God, if no one else,

who knows us in all senses, undivided, whole.

12.

I will lift up mine eyes unto… the sky
       alive again with contrails –
crosshatched with them, intercontinentally high,

unbraiding themselves slowly into stratocumulus,
       learning heaven’s language
haltingly, naturalising to the great wind flows,

snagged fleece of cirrus teased out at a height
        unbreathable to us. Not angels
but the ropes of commerce and of appetite

pulled tight again – of urgent leisure, each year
       a transcendence failed. A sky
of wounds, slow-healing. Sky invisibly scarred.

Cut after cut continuing. And still we dream of flight.

13.

However hard we labour
at a groaning pulley-load of coal,

of rock, of girders, some other
dumb clunk, up from the slipway,

however we churn concrete
for new deeper bunkers, or

the World War I field railway wheezes
round its going-nowhere track,

however long we watch, dig, tend,
or scratch for ore, or meditate

there’s no force like the hunched
moon-power tightening in folds,

ropes, hawsers, round the island,
tug-o’-war twice daily, to, fro, to,

fro, like a loosening tooth, till the night
that drags it off its moorings.

Some mornings, I peer into the sea-fret
to be sure it’s still there. Yes,

there, its bleached-out outline.
Or its memory.

14.

She who preached to the sea, Saint
… who knows?  Name lost as the wind
lifts the spray
                        off from the wave-tips,

the sound she heard far off, way inland
and must see, must hear, must be
an island, know the sea
                                          close to her skin.

She who paced out every point, cove, fold and wrinkle, every nuance, and to each
its dialect,
                    each place, each moment

modulated by the tide, how sea speaks  
parleying with rocks, or with the sheer
or jagged surfaces
                              of wind. Its eloquence,

uncluttered with meanings. If speaking in tongues
is a ‘gift of the spirit’, this was more than enough
for a lifetime.
                          One year, two years, five, to touch

the island, preaching till the words ran out,
as the sea first washed her own voice clean,
then clean away.
                              At last all she could say

was in the languages she was immersed in –
sea babble, sea soothing, and at night the wide
sea-hush.
                 We had to retreat, to row away,

for fear this sea speech would seep into us,
loosening creeds, dissolving doctrines,
would sweep through us
                                              with bird cry

and wind yowl and yes, maybe, who knows,
the voice of the storm you might call God, blowing us open,
                       baring our souls to the sky.

15.

The lighthouse thinks for itself these days,
hollow-boned, bone-white, almost a bone itself,
unmanned and more grandly alone.

When dusk brings it out of itself,
three flashes each ten seconds is its personality,
a life’s work in less than a haiku.

I hardly need you any more,
it would say, if it bothered with words.
It’s just me and the sun

which feeds me. Light unto light.
That, and the near-strangers
who maintain me, distant family,

less and less frequent visitors.
I sleep by day, awake all night
telling my one-word rosary.

I could be some kind of a monk
almost beyond age now, nobody’s
near-and-dearest. What you see

from ashore, the way I tip a wink
of danger-red towards this reef, that wreck,
means little to me – a few splinters of fear

they left me for my memories.
But I don’t go there. Each moment, each day,
each pulse of light is new to me,

the always-newness that’s the birthright
of the utterly old, lost continent
you can see but not reach,

not yet, their treasure island,
fly speck on the map, their sunken reef,
their daily-new-found land.

16.

A burial mound, you might suppose,
give it a thousand years:
the ammunition store

florid with juicy new growth,
rank prickly lettuce, nettles, stinking
iris, speedwell, selfheal…
I could go on,

as he will, the smallest of small saints
on the island, as he sits among
the excavations:

rabbits have grubbed up raw soil
in a rich abundance of spills,
the mound beneath him
re-piled, hollowing,

tilth fine as an anthill’s, powdery brown,
slightly formic, ready for some other
kind of flourishing

while the small saint has to greet them –
it’s his calling – each rabbit, each worm,
each ant, by name, which is one
way to invoke eternity.

Brickwork, concrete, a boarded-up door,
sink in the softening tump.

Chambered tomb. Pyramid stump. So it goes.

17.

All you can say
or write about the island:
Buddhist prayer flags fluttering
        themselves to tatters
               in the wind.