The Reverend Green
You must remember, these songs were always old,
Sir Orfeo. Under the grene wode lynde, where
the thought-dead go, sardining themselves
three miles through a cave past Winchester.
Through the woodland shade, a green fin moves,
no face beneath, only an ancient corn dolly
riding a silver arrow in the reign of mystic Babylon,
King John, in Sherwood Forest and the paths
she knew, each one, every tree a pillar of song,
a cloud of leaves. But silence reigned,
all sounds long gone, not even one bird sang
and the ground was a uniform shade of green.
Near Sherwood, in silence, a cannonball clipped
the steeple of St Mary Magdalene. Another halved
Baron Dohna, standing on a barge in the Trent.
All along the Great North Road smoke rolled
from cannon mouths, circling Newark with a flower.
In the fields around, brewers kept waltzing.
I came to dressed as a Roundhead, so kept concealed
my desire to spend the crown jewels on an army
and land at Bridlington despite it all, titling myself
melodiously Her She-Majesty, Generalissima,
and trying, trying without voice, to bombard the sky,
its many-headed lead and iron, with a pioneering aria.
Moving sinuously north towards a fork in the A1,
my best image of singing was the two slender
chimneys of Ferrybridge C emitting helplessly.
Moving punitively towards the Southern Hemisphere,
my best image of a chimney was Guy Pearce in Priscilla
trailing foil from his great stiletto as the bus rolled on.
Things are different now, or should be. I am an
entire person, an intersection of cheese wires
anchored in the present perimeter. But huge dolls
keep falling out of history and getting mandolined.
In the market square, the cobbles are shining
and the butcher speaks through a microphone
but the unravelling clouds make no noise.
The most confusing comfort: that death can take
the form of a beguiling retinue, a river curling
through its floodplain, a forest, frith with flours,
or the dead curls of a curtailed flow,
Cuckmere Meander, museum peace, the water
beginning to stare at the sky like an oil slick,
the permanent sense of something impending,
the songs of engines starting up. What grows
is terrifying and stealthy, asparagus tips farmed
by muscular salmon, dead-eyed concrete throats
throwing themselves up all over the atlas,
forced rhubarb, the whole roster of Elizabethans
suddenly floating free from their portraits, ruffs
rotating, drifting up into the clouds like a family
of self-decapitating progenitors. At some point,
smoke turns to hope, a pretext for more smoke,
a pollutant way of imagining transfiguration.
But before, during and after that, fragments
with baffled origins, unsung syllables, go tumbling
into the flames, and the chimneys look like trunks
and the smoke looks like bunches of green leaves
and the roots grow so slowly, whatever they are,
that the song they sing extends into silence.
Joseph Minden is working and writing among the collections, nostalgias, deliriums and silences of the heritage industry. He is currently developing a book-length project prompted by the imperial and memorial functions of poppies. Work is future or past in Stand, Blackbox Manifold, PN Review and elsewhere. @JosephMinden
