St Stephens House by touch.

At St Stephen's house
we felt the carvings on the walls.
Skulls grinned as we poked our fingers in their eyes.

The model (with its cold brass geometries of scale)
showed us how small and insignificant we were - as if we didn't know.

But then we stumbled
on a pattern in the rock
upon a block
of limestone in the wall.
We felt the sharp and shelly sand
with semi- rounded pebbles
from the ancient storm and flood
that rolled them into place.
We felt the smoother grains above
that told of later long
and windless weeks and water
smooth as glass.

Through several hundred million years
this memory in rock remained to
teach us how the little things
endure beyond our wildest dreams.

(c) A McN

No-one had interpreted rock strata to him before. It was a Eureka moment when he realised his fingers were touching a weather event from millions of years ago - a tactile photograph of time.

Transcience

I seem to have been snatching at water all my life.

I speak and the words evaporate into space.
I reach out and touch another but the tingle of the contact fades.
I pray but forget who or what I prayed for.

I see beauty but recall only faintest outlines.
I hear the music of voices I love
but the memory is a faint recording dimly heard through the static of the brain.

I have moments of deep connection when love and respect
arc like electricity in the gap between lives
But so soon it becomes a wisp of remembrance
curling like smoke around faint insecurities.

Even standing still a flood of seconds surges round me;
milliseconds froth and spray against my face.

I want to capture life
To catch a little bowl of friendship and experience,
keep it on the mantelpiece where treasures might be counted like iridiscent fish;
But I know the fish would die.

The transcience of life provokes me;
the flutter of days tumbling from month to year unsettles me.
I feel like a child beneath an autumn tree
snatching at the leaves that cartwheel through the air
and wondering all the time if standing still with outstretched arms
would fetch me more.

So I will rest a while;
letting the golden leaves of time still tumble down
without the need for catching every one,

letting the flow of life slip through my hands
but splashing my face in clean refreshing spray.

I will attempt to live with open eyes and thankful heart today.


(c) A McN


It remains one of the many childhood pleasures I still enjoy. When the leaves fall off the trees I have to catch one at least. They fall with slow elegance but are deceptively difficult to catch.

Without

I went out at night,
wilfully unprepared.
without torch,
without phone,
without purpose,
without plan;
save that of being vulnerable enough
to receive the things
from which I normally hide.

Engine switches off…….silence.
Lights off next……. darkness.

Opening the door,
face-tingling cold damp air waterfalls
into the warm car cocoon.
But I am going out.

The sky dark with night and mist and black cloud brooding.
The bridlepath a tunnel of grasping tree fingers groping to touch me
and a breeze blowing through dead leaves;
tumbling them down with a skeleton rattle.

Everywhere, the silence quivers.
Rats breathing, mice creeping, owls calling.
Hidden eyes watch me.
Ears turn to follow me.

Mouse whiskers twitch among the leaves.
Mist whispers in the trees; seethes through ragged branches.

All senses are alert.
I walk slowly enough to be silent,
slowly enough to be unnoticed,
slowly enough to force my heartbeat down.

Time and space distort in darkness.
Trees are airy, eerie geometries enclosing
fractal shapes that shift between dimensions
depending on light, fear and imagination.

But strangeness electrifies.
Every sense is amplified by darkness,
fingering new feelings I never felt before.

I sense the silt of history stirring in the breeze
and phantom memories uncurling in the misted wind.
Long dead shepherds mutter together,
bringing long dead sheep down for the night.

Beyond them the landscape flickers like an ancient film as
woodlands come and go, wolves howl at the moon and far behind,
the mammoths lumber through;
ice frosting the wrinkles on their elephantine skin.

This is the moment of connection.
Time and space flex with elastic ease
and the mystery of life's feisty pilgrimage
hangs heavy in the autumn air.

It only deepens as the decades into aeons run
and standing in the darkness of an autumn night I see
That I will nourish worms one day
wthout diminishing
the miracle of me.

(c) A McN