views of an abbey like an antfarm?
Or a library of writhing scribes,
tonsured
&
humming in the secrecy
of their solitude tunes no one
has heard for twelve hundred years?
Drawn to the eremitical
&
the ruined,
I discover that loneliness is random,
soli tude ri tual.
And scribal error is rampant.
"God should not be subject
to the Art of Grammar,"
wrote your abbot Aelfric
in one of his prefaces.
But whose naked narrative will suffice?
"These admonitions are suitable for the teachable;
for the unteachable
&
hard of heart
no encouragements are sufficient."
This is your world now, not Bede's,
&
I am becoming familiar
with what bones of it are left-
from the pagan thrill of Cerne Abbas,
priapic giant cheek by jowl
with the spell of Augustine's well;
to the pillow stones at Lindisfarne,
with their uneven quadrants
of crosses
&
names
&
runes;
to the uncorrupted body
of St. Cuthbert at Durham-
all embedded in the privacy
of a stopped tongue,
the solitary unravelling
of the scholar.
