Shelter
Drenched, I climb the churchyard wall while there is a little light still, looking for shelter. I have no business here. My tread is in the hiss of fallen apples; under and under, soil is sour with their sinking liquor.
Crops of half-forgotten surfeit— the windfalls of an old neglect—
lie among the mind's impermeable rock. I remember a sundial pediment of golden sandstone a sudden September rain began to stain, plumskins of wet spreading. My father spoke: not now, you must wait till the sun shows, come out of the weather. The graze was in my grip all the day from scouring the stone dry till he wrenched my grasp. He pulled me out of Worcestershire.
I
was in the white of a pointed porch, wet in my first smell of church.
There were flowers, it was harvest, the altar was ripe. I chased the sparrows from the barley aisle, confronted a humping eagle, kicked scuttles of blunt vegetables. Pear- smell, currant press were everywhere, and heads of chrysanthemum; bread left to stale among the hard bosses of long monuments.
Rummaging cupboards of vestments, candle-ends and broken sacred books, I felt the fluted alabaster backs of stored cherubim. There were flags to clatter on. I tore down rags of cobweb. Behind a flanged black stove was a cross that would not move though I pulled with all my weight.
We left when the rain had stopped in a gap of sun enough to learn to tell the time by. A rough- edged shadow fell that the stone soaked up. If there is light in the rain, sometimes I shelter here, shiver in this other whitewashed porch, never certain whether I should smoke and, not smoking, wait. I look through the parish almanac, learn we are in Advent; idly scan a list of names of neighbours who have promised Christmas flowers.
Then, as it grows too dark to read, seeing the storm still falls, too hard to stop, I pull the iron hasp to, do up my coat.
Deliberately, through a chime of metal echoes,
I walk to the wall past the tree whose fruits fall softly on to the turf.
TED WALKER
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