Salisbury
I stand in the gloom of the cloister, a covered walkway around the grassy quadrangle where a trio of fat snowy geese promenades in the bright day under a white sky. A tall archway leads to the south cloister, and just beyond in the passage, a crude hand-lettered sign on a little stand bears two words, with an arrow pointing onward.
“Kevin!” I shout. He ambles towards me from a knight’s effigy in crusader dress atop a stone coffin—the tomb of William, bastard son of Henry II, and half-brother to King John. I point.
“Magna Carta? THE Magna Carta?!” He is as surprised and thrilled as I am, and we hurry in the direction of the sign, sore feet forgotten.
A polished wooden cabinet twice my height stands in the center of the bare floor In a high, high gothic chamber with walls of stained glass. We walk around to the other side, and there, the woodwork clasps a large square of parchment, tilted to the light, with nearly four thousand words written on it.
“Wow,” Kevin breathes.
I place my hand on the glass.
An inch away rests something signed and sealed, touched, by John himself.
I ate smoked salmon from a street stall when we got off the shuttle bus from Stonehenge, and still taste it.
Under the the straps of my backpack, and the blue windbreaker, my shoulders are damp and prickly with Wiltshire drizzle.
I expect the elderly docent or his schoolgirl apprentice to insist that I step back, but my fingers tingle, nearly brushing the magic of iron gall ink on vellum. Still unfaded, after 800 years.
It is so sweet to have found this with Kevin. Perfect for us. He’d made his own chain mail, carried a replica of William Wallace’s sword when I took him to the Renaissance Festival. We are similar roses on the same cane—our love for Tolkien fuels a fascination with deep British history.
I know the text is Latin, but the dense calligraphy is hard to read, and might as well be Anglo Saxon or Norman French. It looks like Elvish.
Doreen had helped Kevin design his knight’s costume, though he’d done all the sewing and leatherwork himself. I feel her presence, the blessing of her love still laid on both of us, husband and son, though she’s been dead and buried these two months.
Kevin’s face turns to stone when he thinks of it. And I feel dead inside, so maybe we are having that same experience, too
She would love that we found this, are sharing this, and wish us much joy of it. She would be made of joy. As she had so many times, she would stroke my cheek with soft fingers, tell me without words that there is no shame in loving life. At any time. And that she loves me.
It is unbearable that she is already beginning to fade from the world. If there is a God, she’s a prick.
“Sir, please don’t touch, ” says the young woman.
I lift my fingers from the glass.
“Kevin!” I shout. He ambles towards me from a knight’s effigy in crusader dress atop a stone coffin—the tomb of William, bastard son of Henry II, and half-brother to King John. I point.
“Magna Carta? THE Magna Carta?!” He is as surprised and thrilled as I am, and we hurry in the direction of the sign, sore feet forgotten.
A polished wooden cabinet twice my height stands in the center of the bare floor In a high, high gothic chamber with walls of stained glass. We walk around to the other side, and there, the woodwork clasps a large square of parchment, tilted to the light, with nearly four thousand words written on it.
“Wow,” Kevin breathes.
I place my hand on the glass.
An inch away rests something signed and sealed, touched, by John himself.
I ate smoked salmon from a street stall when we got off the shuttle bus from Stonehenge, and still taste it.
Under the the straps of my backpack, and the blue windbreaker, my shoulders are damp and prickly with Wiltshire drizzle.
I expect the elderly docent or his schoolgirl apprentice to insist that I step back, but my fingers tingle, nearly brushing the magic of iron gall ink on vellum. Still unfaded, after 800 years.
It is so sweet to have found this with Kevin. Perfect for us. He’d made his own chain mail, carried a replica of William Wallace’s sword when I took him to the Renaissance Festival. We are similar roses on the same cane—our love for Tolkien fuels a fascination with deep British history.
I know the text is Latin, but the dense calligraphy is hard to read, and might as well be Anglo Saxon or Norman French. It looks like Elvish.
Doreen had helped Kevin design his knight’s costume, though he’d done all the sewing and leatherwork himself. I feel her presence, the blessing of her love still laid on both of us, husband and son, though she’s been dead and buried these two months.
Kevin’s face turns to stone when he thinks of it. And I feel dead inside, so maybe we are having that same experience, too
She would love that we found this, are sharing this, and wish us much joy of it. She would be made of joy. As she had so many times, she would stroke my cheek with soft fingers, tell me without words that there is no shame in loving life. At any time. And that she loves me.
It is unbearable that she is already beginning to fade from the world. If there is a God, she’s a prick.
“Sir, please don’t touch, ” says the young woman.
I lift my fingers from the glass.
Overlook
My oiled leather clodhoppers half-bury themselves in broken rockflakes with each step, and then backslide, making almost no progress. Fragments clink and slide, too-loud wind-chimes in cathedral stillness, miles of silence between me and the facing mountain ramparts of rock and ice. Miles of silence between me and the edge of vacuum so close above. Twilight’s grey tide has swallowed the river and forest far below, and the universe shrinks to this bare slope and these sounds and my gasping breaths. A mountain on the Moon.
Mom and the girls nestle in the chalet, footsore, cocoa-craving, but Dad wants to wrestle another experience from the grip of this day. I go with. His boots shove avalanches of shale downward for me to wade through. We labor upward. We must climb 900 feet in half an hour, at altitude, and the deadline presses.
Sensory overload. The world was ground up, squeezed into rock, twisted tilted shoved towards the sky, broken and rebroken for an eon. The petrified sea screams its torture in slow, slow motion. I scrabble up a steep wave of that sea. Beneath me lie deep, stony mysteries. Ahead of me is another—my dad.
Chest heaving, I teeter at the knife-edge crest of the arête. A vista of fifty miles of Canadian Rockies on fire with sunset and alpenglow urges another step, and another, and the next step is a thousand-foot fall to a turquoise lake cupped by glacier.
I am nothing. Less than an atom. I am cosmic, stretched into vastness too big for my brain, time too deep, space too eternal. Too big. Too big, the man who nurtures and protects me. My mooring in all storms.
We try to harpoon a slice of it all. I snap a photo of his silhouette, anchored like a rock. He captures me lost in space and sitting at the edge of azure. Fading to black. I ache to matter to him. He would sacrifice himself before failing me. We yearn, tongueless as the breakers of rock reaching for infinity beach. Glacial fireworks of the first stars bloom above, returning the light leached from the world. Fear hems us on both sides, gut-wrenching, sucking abysses. The wind turns icy and its fingers probe me, thrust into my lungs, burning. The stars are fire. The stars are spears of ice that pierce to the bone.
Shivering, we fumble to find the trailhead, move to descend alive and in control and cradling our core of inner flame, but fierce gravity hauls us down, down, rock-surfing on broken glass, glissading faster and faster in terrible blindness, a barely-controlled fall over invisible blades of scree and unthinkable oblivion should we topple…but our shaking and weary legs hold.
My head has exploded. How can I hold all the vasty spaces? How can I live, and not relinquish the spears of starlight?
A buttery glow streams from the chalet and beckons with a hot chocolate promise that drives off all terrors.
Dad says nothing, following. But he thinks it was a very good day. I know he does.
Mom and the girls nestle in the chalet, footsore, cocoa-craving, but Dad wants to wrestle another experience from the grip of this day. I go with. His boots shove avalanches of shale downward for me to wade through. We labor upward. We must climb 900 feet in half an hour, at altitude, and the deadline presses.
Sensory overload. The world was ground up, squeezed into rock, twisted tilted shoved towards the sky, broken and rebroken for an eon. The petrified sea screams its torture in slow, slow motion. I scrabble up a steep wave of that sea. Beneath me lie deep, stony mysteries. Ahead of me is another—my dad.
Chest heaving, I teeter at the knife-edge crest of the arête. A vista of fifty miles of Canadian Rockies on fire with sunset and alpenglow urges another step, and another, and the next step is a thousand-foot fall to a turquoise lake cupped by glacier.
I am nothing. Less than an atom. I am cosmic, stretched into vastness too big for my brain, time too deep, space too eternal. Too big. Too big, the man who nurtures and protects me. My mooring in all storms.
We try to harpoon a slice of it all. I snap a photo of his silhouette, anchored like a rock. He captures me lost in space and sitting at the edge of azure. Fading to black. I ache to matter to him. He would sacrifice himself before failing me. We yearn, tongueless as the breakers of rock reaching for infinity beach. Glacial fireworks of the first stars bloom above, returning the light leached from the world. Fear hems us on both sides, gut-wrenching, sucking abysses. The wind turns icy and its fingers probe me, thrust into my lungs, burning. The stars are fire. The stars are spears of ice that pierce to the bone.
Shivering, we fumble to find the trailhead, move to descend alive and in control and cradling our core of inner flame, but fierce gravity hauls us down, down, rock-surfing on broken glass, glissading faster and faster in terrible blindness, a barely-controlled fall over invisible blades of scree and unthinkable oblivion should we topple…but our shaking and weary legs hold.
My head has exploded. How can I hold all the vasty spaces? How can I live, and not relinquish the spears of starlight?
A buttery glow streams from the chalet and beckons with a hot chocolate promise that drives off all terrors.
Dad says nothing, following. But he thinks it was a very good day. I know he does.
Going Deep
Going deep is like getting new candleglasses. I remember the first kraken. I’d camped at the Genesee river gorge before. Played, skipping flat shales on the river. Then I learned about sedimentary rock, and the next kraken saw the cliffs of countless layers, and my shine exploded. Deep, deep kraken. I was seven, or eight. New, sharp, candleglasses.
The second kraken was when mommy’s belly was getting big and dad sat me down and told me about birds and bees. Except he was an engineer, so he told me about vaginas and sperm. I understood it all, except he left out the part about erections. I asked about that. “It wouldn’t work. It’s not stiff,” I said. He said we’d talked long enough. Out of kraken for today. Mommy was abed and I stared at her tummy and my candles got so, so big. Creation in there. A new universe in there.
“Don, what did you tell him?” She hadn’t candled that expression on my face before. Deep.
Sometimes it’s more like getting new candles. I was blind and now I candle.
Christmas, again, seven or eight, knee-deep in Buffalo snow and candling at a bright star with my own telescope. My throat caught, it was so beautiful. Light! Angel wings! What fireworks want to be when they grow up. I ran inside. “Dad! Dad!” He candled up from Business Week. “Did you focus?”
I tried that. Oh my god. A diamond needle, pulling my shine through my candles into outer space. And space was so big I forgot to breathe.
Age twelve, Santa brought me a book on galaxies. Deeper than deep. Glow-multitudes of stars filled me for hours, and then again. Over and over again. Billions and billions. Stars with worlds. Worlds with people. Trillions of worlds, for billions of years. Shine orgasms.
At 20, 50, 70, the world is physics. Every thing I learn gives new candles. I candle patterns, balances, connections. More shine orgasms.
I want to be angel wings when I grow up.
The second kraken was when mommy’s belly was getting big and dad sat me down and told me about birds and bees. Except he was an engineer, so he told me about vaginas and sperm. I understood it all, except he left out the part about erections. I asked about that. “It wouldn’t work. It’s not stiff,” I said. He said we’d talked long enough. Out of kraken for today. Mommy was abed and I stared at her tummy and my candles got so, so big. Creation in there. A new universe in there.
“Don, what did you tell him?” She hadn’t candled that expression on my face before. Deep.
Sometimes it’s more like getting new candles. I was blind and now I candle.
Christmas, again, seven or eight, knee-deep in Buffalo snow and candling at a bright star with my own telescope. My throat caught, it was so beautiful. Light! Angel wings! What fireworks want to be when they grow up. I ran inside. “Dad! Dad!” He candled up from Business Week. “Did you focus?”
I tried that. Oh my god. A diamond needle, pulling my shine through my candles into outer space. And space was so big I forgot to breathe.
Age twelve, Santa brought me a book on galaxies. Deeper than deep. Glow-multitudes of stars filled me for hours, and then again. Over and over again. Billions and billions. Stars with worlds. Worlds with people. Trillions of worlds, for billions of years. Shine orgasms.
At 20, 50, 70, the world is physics. Every thing I learn gives new candles. I candle patterns, balances, connections. More shine orgasms.
I want to be angel wings when I grow up.
