Thomas Jackson's Website

 

 

A Church Nearly Abandoned

 

The harsh and sour smell of a past long gone

The disturbingly loud tick of a clock.

Hassocks are damp, the hymn books musty

The Bible, as it happens, open at Ezekiel fourteen.

Above the chancel-arch pale visions of heaven and hell

Appear again through peeling whitewash slapped on

By zealous puritans at the Reformation.  Lost souls tumble

Down into the gaping jaws of devils above a phrase of dog Latin.

Floor tiles are cracked, there are cobwebs in corners

Surprisingly, a vase of dead flowers brown on a dusty lintel;

Unpolished pews that no-one has sat in for years

The squirrels and serpents on the newels dark with age.

A sudden creaking bench arouses nameless jabbing fears.

The silence is penetrating, an unlucky dead bird a shock

You shiver involuntarily; at the enclosing desolation

And the piercing cold and so many nearby graves.                                                                                              

Everything is faded, everything old

The senses fail before so much dust and mould.

 

 

An honoured ‘here lieth’ of some importance in life buried

Under a much worn gravestone in the nave is crumbled

Into nothing and long gone.  Beyond the rood screen with its

Painted panels of scratched out saints, above the choir

A plaster bust of Emilia moft amiable and devoted wife

Of Sir Henry Hassett Bar’t and their six dead infants.

What tears and turbulences of the heart must have gone on

Behind those unseeing alabaster eyes?  I picture vivid Medieval lives

Pardoners, the del boys of their time, expertly filleting gullibles

Lusty bonneted wives in Sunday best, apple cheeked children

The torn consciences of the Reformation, and during the long

Unenthusiastic eighteenth century years livid faced squire

And parson drinking port, then top-hatted and stiff-collared

Sir Henry Hassett with Emilia, so conscious of their station

In their special squire’s pew so empty of their six dead infants.

All vanished and gone.  It is as hard to imagine

As envisage an old aunt you visit in her dowdy home

Was once a blooming young bride, and is now alone

Stranded in unhappiness and helplessness and urine.

 

And what of the future?  How will this scene be centuries hence

When Norfolk is under water?  First the sodden hymn books,

Their well loved words and melodies undone by the devouring sea                                                                                                       

Will disintegrate and give back their atoms to the universe from whence

They came.                                                                                            

The bonds of being in curtain and hassock will separate

Into neptunian nothingness.  I imagine long wandering weeds winding

About the altar and shoals of wondering fish peering at the unseeing face

Of amiable Amelia before she too completely vanishes, the rood screen and the pulpit,                                                                                           

Preserved by lack of air, nibbled and holed into fantastic exuberances of submarine excrescences.                                                                  

Gradually a different scale of times and states will begin its rule, 

Each tick of the clock a day, each hour a year, each year a millennium. 

In the warming seas a school of brilliant fish will flash between the arches,                                                                                                  

The nave patrolled by ugly monsters grown hideous in shape and size                                                                                                            

From pressures of the deep. Eventually, eon by eon, covered                                                                                                   

By thick layers and slow sediments of time the roof will buckle

 Under the great weight of water, the leaning pillars will sink down

To the sea floor, even stones will be ground into sand, doubly obliterated                                                                                               

By ooze and mud and slime, and the absence of humanity; none to know,

To imagine, to see meaning and to recognize, for humanity too will be no more.

 

Yet slowly I become aware – or do I? - of the bright spirits gathered here

Invisible to both imagination and to reason, and indeed to sense, but present

To the mind, in this dense and taut and pungent atmosphere.

Disturbed by my entry they had vanished but gradually they

Re-appear, to again start dwelling graciously in this their ghostly place

Where once in life they had offered up so much entangled love and pain.

Their presence is as abstracted and unknowable to sight as mathematics.

Here imagination fails; but the address of this atmosphere to the astonished soul                                                                                                           

Is as lucid and compelling as if this emplacement were a delicate instrument                                                                                            

Designed for a further faculty that we possess, as microscopes and telescopes                                                                                            

Extend the eyes, or like receiver dishes at Menwith Hill and Filingdales                              

Harvesting faint messages from remotest regions of inner space

As if, in this quiet place, as if implanted messages in column, pulpit, arch and pillar

Bring down, even down to us through long passages of time, encoded information

Stretching back through stone circles, henges, tumuli, tholoi, neolithic graves

Back and back through burial chambers and rock tombs and ice age caves

Back yet further to a  knowledge of a light that is beyond darkness, of a life that is

Beyond death, to brighten and to bless the night we know and fear,

That presses in upon us only just outside our attention and our reason.

And so it is that I cross these silent fields and come down this quiet lane                                                                                                     

Through snowdrops blooming between the lichened graves, and blackbirds calling                                                                                                      

In the spring, through hot lazy summer months and the drifting leaves of autumn                                                                                                 

And then through the short chilly days of winter, through every clime and season

To enter, enchanted and enthralled, this further magical and riveting dimension                                                                                                     

That is beyond both past and future, again and again and again.

 

 

A Poem For You

 

 

If I could I would write a poem for you

But I can’t think of one just now

So I send these few words instead

 

But perhaps they are a poem after all

For poems do not live in words

But in the heart and in the head.

 

 

A Quiet Passing

 

And so she came to the dark tower

Whose lengthening shadows

Slowly devour the light

And slipped without word

Into that impenetrable night.

 

But she went serene and prepared.

Her spirit had burnt during all her past

With fevers, guilts and fears

And fierce anxieties. But in the last years

With the pain and the helplessness

She learnt to be patient, grew still with tranquilities

And her living resolved itself at last

Into clear joys and sweet simplicities.

 

She went beyond caring.

The acids that tortured her spirit so fiercely

Dissolved into air, sweet air.

She became all made of kindness.

Even the nurses were touched with elation;

We were cross with her sometimes

But really gave what we had to give gladly

For we knew that we were witnesses

Of a gracious transformation.

 

In the last days death was in her face

Already her spirit seemed distant.

And her mind out of reach.

We knew she was going                                                                                                        Hushed, we stood in silence

As her boat slid quietly

Into the shadows

At the end of all her voyaging.

 

They buried her in a churchyard

In a quiet corner of England

Within earshot of the silence of the sea

And the ceaselessness of tide and wave

Where primroses and violets

And pansies and forget-me-nots

Follow in solemn march

Where the year still wheels in festivals

And wild winds blow on her grave

 

 

 

At Mass

 

I stretched out my hand today to try

To lay hold of summer as it flew by

But all in vain; even as I saw

Fleeing time ran on before

Now became then, the moment gone

This hour and all that it contains sped on.

 

Last evening Springwatch presented by Kate Humble

Eggs hatch, chicks cheep, new lambs stand and tumble

Chris fends off all this cruel beauty with irony

Simon laments robbed nests with melancholy

Bur Kate being a woman is different, in a way part of it

Detached, like us, but also somehow in the heart of it

 

For a moment she’s all women, the whole scene almost relieves

My pressing need for intercourse with the beautiful

In ways sex, somehow, never quite achieves.

Women are – could you say? - more there, more natural

Their natures at once both simpler and more complex

Sex glorified by nature and nature transformed by sex.

For a moment a stab of love that’s almost pain.

 

The moment vanishes, and Kate’s just Kate again.

I try to grasp once more what may or may not have been

But cannot reach it through the TV screen

Kate’s droning on about websites, telling you

To make sure to change wet socks, as women do.

 

And then last Tuesday to King Lear

All make-believe of course, just wigs and paint

One thing’s for sure, real life it ain’t

Do something useful, get a proper job I jeer

The old fool’s not mad, they’re not really king and queen

Yet not quite pretending either, but something in between

That strange untrue truth with which we engage

In the two hours’ traffic of the stage

 

At mass the priest holds up the bread

The living body of one once dead

The host is tasteless, the wine cheap

Surely this is hocus-pocus, why then do I keep

On believing it not just in spite of but because

It’s difficult to believe? Perhaps to stem the loss

 

Of what I sometimes wonder I once knew

A truth that is more true than true

To staunch the hunger that we sometimes feel

For a reality more real than real

The feeling that the here and now, this definite article

Is but a wave collapsed into a particle.

 

Perhaps, with regret, I’d dismiss all this as nonsense

Were it not for the astonishments of science

The Big Bang coming out of nothing – whatever that is

And atoms, it appears, are mostly empty spaces

Well it doesn’t look like that, this bond of trust

Our senses make with sticks and stones and dust.

 

But then I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, in any case

No longer yearn to see, or not to see, the face

Of the divine lover who may be dwelling or not dwelling

In my heart, to shrug off these glimpses telling or not telling

Us of somewhere else, that may be or may not be eternity

To abandon this spellbinding fascination so compelling

 

With an eternal self we know only by its lack

In this brief encampment, this passing bivouac.

 

(I can’t help feeling that ‘The old fool’s not mad, they’re not really king and queen/ Yet not quite pretending either, but something in between’ has a ring of Larkin about it,. although I cannot find it in his works.  Perhaps I didn’t look hard enough.  If I have plagiarized the great master I offer him my apologies and much gratitude for so much pleasure given.) 

 

 

Belonging

 

I suppose it is perfection of form

Why a naked woman is so beautiful

A high congruence of natural art

A sensual totality, the whole lady                                                                                                          

A sweet belonging of each part.

 I gaze upon this lovely thing of nature

Like a satyr looking through a window -

The slim ankles, the slender neck              

The neat toes that so undermine my heart.

 

Borne aloft on our big brains I have escaped nature

Not simply instinctual now but conceptual, almost

A visiting intellectual, a mind trapped in a creature

I am no longer the snow and the wind and the rain.                                         . 

You are human too like me, and yet – O miracle!

You are beautiful as the flowers are beautiful

Through you I belong to the earth again.

 

 

So perhaps that is why my heart turns over

When you get up afterwards to pour the tea

Because you are so beautiful

And because I am your lover.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Castaway

 

I think I’ll take to my desert island the late novels of Henry James

How I’ll luxuriate in those thickets of complex implication

As – plop! – the coconuts drop inconsequentially and randomly

Quite without intention or irony

In quiet moments of stillness too still for meanings or names.

 

Nine bean rows shall I have there upon my fabled isle

Much of the day I’ll spend, I plan, in meditation

Sitting for years just quietly

Like the Buddha under the bojum tree

While the bees work the bean flowers with neither guilt not guile.

 

I’ll hear the waves sussurring softly with a low sound on the shore

In gentle rhythmic unplanned regulation

I’ll have breakfast at three (pm)

And cornflakes and mangoes for tea

While I shout to the seagulls ‘Hi there! Nothing matters any more’.

 

I’ll think of the empty atomic spaces in the solid grains of sand

Piled up in trillionned drifted aggregation

I’ll listen to the winds whispering strange words

I’ll have a shot at learning the language of the birds

And cry out’ Mine!  All mine!’ upon the echoing strand.

 

But it’s no good -

 

I’ll never drift in the lazy noon through the hot lagoon dreaming

Of  Maggie Verver and Millie Theale

The local park will have to do as my theatre of elation.

Most consequentially defecating dogs, pram-pushing mums

Drunk tramps on benches, lobelias and geraniums

The discarded evidence of en plein air copulation  

Are paradise indefinitely postponed – but real.

 

 

        

IExistence

 

How can I put into words this love that has come upon me?

For existence shining and still in all that exists                                                                                                           

The almost understood songs of the running rivers

The very beginnings of music in bird calls

The secret voices of the winds

Sweet cherishing of the earth by rain

The stillness in the stillness of the autumn mists

 

Why did I not realize that colour is a marriage

A love affair between light and matter?    Waiting impatiently                                                                                                                                             In the molecular structures of flowers and in the lightwaves

And in the billions of photons streaming out of the sun

Awaiting its priest, a eucharistic minister, a celebrant, a holy man 

One who joins in holy union and brings to fulfilment.                                                                                                       The coded images on the retina firing across the axons and synapses                                                                                                       Until re-united in splendour in the temple of the brain                                                                                                                 I am lost in astonishment at this transubstantiating wonder

I pray, I robe, I purify myself, and go out to glorify a geranium

 

And what am I to do with it?  This strange feeling in my head                                                                                                              That waiting only just the other side of an invisible screen,                                                                                                            Only just out of my sight is a great army of the dead.                                                                                                                         Surely this is nonsense, they are not absent as an empty chair is vacant                                                                                                                      Awaiting its returning occupant, but vanished absolutely, gone.                                                                                                                          Surely this is quite fanciful. But it doesn’t quite feel like that

Go away, I shout, you’re nothing, you know you don’t exist                                                                                                                                                             But there they are still: hovering, mute, silent, beseeching, beautiful

 

 

How I have come to treasure Chinese painting

The long patient years of observation

The slow closing of the gap between mind and its object

Then the swift seizing it in a few minutes’ brushwork

Life flows through a bamboo, willows hang over water

Apricot trees in the spring, a heron fishing

The totality of its being gathered in its action

Cherry blossoms burst from bare branches, an autumn moon;

Junks sailing on a gleaming river, a swiftness of birds

A lady bows to a Taoist master

But above all what is not painted

The white background, the vacant surround

The nothing out of which all these lovely things come

The emptiness, the stillness, the silence

 

 

How do I  know that this isn’t all nonsense?

An escape from life?  A self-gratifying act?

What about science?  Data, experiment, peer review.

The hard empirical bullets of fact

But science too tells us of the emptiness

The non-existence that was all that existed

Before the Big Bang, visible particles that in another dimension

Are invisible waves, in instantaneous non-local communication

Across the whole universe, randomly appearing quarks

Emerging from nothing and then disappearing back

Into nothing.  The emptiness. The stillness. The silence.

Known always to mystics and now also to science

 

How can I put into words what cannot be put into words?

This indescribable unimagineable lover dwelling

Deep in my heart.    Is this too an illusion?

It hardly matters, for who would abandon a love so compelling?

The emptiness. The stillness.  The silence

And what after death?  What then?  Will the cosmos

Translate us into a blinding transcendental enlightenment?

Or just leave us to rot.  Blackness, blankness, not even nothing.

 

‘And in the morning I shall know your face’

 

Will there be the encounter with being?  With existence itself?

The divine greeting? The longed-for meeting?  Or not?

 

Faces

 

My friend Sebastian has been to Auschwitz

And what haunts him, he tells me, are the faces

Rows and rows of photographs of faces, harrowed

And appalled and astonished into another dimension

By this unimagineable evil to which they had come.

 

While he was at Auschwitz I was at Chartres

And I too keep thinking of faces

Noble and sensitive and delicate faces

Gravely paying hushed and loving attention

To goodness and truth, the very surrounding air

Become exquisite with the gentle humanity

Of their stone resurrection.  Ranged in rows

Before the threshold, either side of the porch,

Ushering us into another dimension.

 

And, indeed, what will undo us are faces

Faces that you pass shut up in the particular

In malls and precincts and shopping arcades.

You can see, as in crystal, written upon them

What our fate will be in the coming decades.

‘Got up.  Cornflakes.  Put the cat out.

Caught bus to work, news in paper sad.

Julian had egg on his tie.  How we laughed.

Bus home.  Tesco ready meal not bad.

Fed cat. TV.  Put out rubbish. Bed.

Woke up to find I was still dead.’

 

Perhaps, after all, the Last Judgment portrayed

On the cathedral’s façade gets it well,

The saved souls ascending to bliss, and demons

Pitchforking with relish the damned into hell

(What acts of virtue must have been at the last

As SS slammed the doors of the gas chambers fast).

At its extremities life is too excessive, too strange

Too inordinately, inexplicably evil and good

For this theatre of chrome and concrete and plastic

To be ‘the real world’, as we call it,

We are all foot soldiers of the fantastic.

 

We too face a last judgment, a searing cleavage

Of evil and good, even between saving and destroying                                                                                                       The earth, an absolute choice, crossing the threshold                                                                                                                Into this other dimension of Auschwitz and Chartres.

But to save the world we have to change our faces.

Only when the faces you meet in malls and arcades

Have become as gentle as the statues of Chartres

With a Smithian sympathy for all of humanity, will we

Make the right choice between better and worse.

We conquer unimagineable evil by imagining good,

Shut up in the particular, even in precincts,

Rational beings have minds as big as the universe.

 

Sky Fingers

 

I run my fingers across the sky, pushing and probing everywhere

Searching for the secret door through which I might go

Shouting ‘Mr Coleridge are you there?’

 

Blake and his burning tyger, Eliot with coffee spoons rampant

Among the tapestried figures on the glowing walls

The run stealers flicker to and fro, stout Cortez gazes –

Who owns these magic halls?

 

A damsel with a dulcimer, Wordsworth’s universal powers

Our true home said Augustine, the Proustian pure time

The auditory imagination Eliot called it, Lowry the other side

The primary reality was Erich Neumann’s term

While Love revealed to Dante his Beatrician bride

 

Coleridge’s imagination, Blake’s twofold vision

Keats’ negative capability, Marlowe’s mighty line

So many names for what cannot be named

That whereof we cannot speak, according to Wittgenstein

 

I walk in wonderment in the country of astonishment

Through re-created because re-imagined planet earth

Drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple lights the orchard apple

Hazy heat is absorbed and not refracted in East Coker’s stones

 

The desert  is for ever eloquent with Ozimandias’s shattered monument

A world renewed by wonder as by the secret ministry of frost

Aldestrop is bright with birdsong, at an Arundel tomb a birth -

 

Does this path lead to paradise? Or an empty cage of vacated bones?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Ode to Todmorden

 

When God

Made Tod

He was most mystified

He couldn’t quite decide

Where to put it

So he put it down just here

Not quite in Yorkshire

And not quite in Lancashire.

 

 

The Unlived Life

 

Last night I decided at 9.24

Not to live life any more

So I went to bed

And watched TV instead.

 

St Lucy’s Day

 

Deep darkness of December.  Black nights.  Sullen days.

Sodden silence in the drowned land.

Storms rage and gales howl

And turkeys run shrieking to their deaths.

But still still.  Darkness darkness.  Still still.

 

Lights! Lights! Where are my switzers?

Let darkness be quenched in bowls of light.

Ho ho ho’s and glittering of tinsel

And the head of John the Baptist on a dish

Decorated with five gold rings, one through his tongue

One in his nose, one for each ear, and one for luck.

Away with the darkness, away in a manger

Old King Cole looked out over the brilliant                                                                                                                                                    

White snow fields on the feast of Stephen.

 

Still still.  Darkness darkness.  Still still.

 

Mistletoe druidically dim on misty oaks.

Raindrops glimmering jewels on black branches.

 

I am coming.  I am coming.