Pauline Stainer Poems

I still see them -
the sculptors of Kilpeck
on the road
to Santiago de Compostela,
crossing the Roman bridge
in the small hours

westward,
always westward,
Finisterre referring
its azure,
the jubilation of wolves
spilling into the cloister.

But some
never made it back
through the wilderness
to chisel
a sleeping Christ
from the living tree

and lie fallow
under their larch ceiling
as if amazed
by the irrepressible light
at the burial of the stars.
...

'How does water remain so unfamiliar?'
Roni Horn
It's not told
how the animals left,
but waiting to disembark
their breath formed a cloud
and fell as light rain.

It gathered in hollows
under their eyes,
the peaceable kingdom
laid down, like memory
in a library of water

and long after landing
they would watch
for the waterspouts
and that mysterious fall
of fish from the air.
...

They came down holloways
between blue sloes.

I have come to know
that register of blue-darks

juniper berries deepening
through woodsmoke

the pungency of bruised herbs
at dusk

slow-burn
of driven beasts

blue intake of breath
at pasture beyond.
...

Young ravens
in the White Tower,
cross-lit, conspirational.

He is teaching them to talk -
calls them
an unkindness of seven

as if remembering
their prophetic tongues
leading wolves to prey

the deer stepping
through tall blue mist
to water unseen

the speech of birds
picking memory clean.
...

after Dürer
You might catch them
in a nocturnal landscape
on their flight into Egypt,
the moon dropping
thin flexible mirrors.

Or in a wild strawberry place,
wychelms coming
softly into leaf
through dispensation
of mist

the child lighter
than sugar-lift etching,
but still suckling
with the energy
of an icon.
...

for Peter Johnson
There they were -
ordinary, unknowable,
beasts waiting to be blessed
at St. Luke in the Fields

some trying to break cover
as if they hear
the whizz of the biblical wind
in the mulberry trees

others, domesticated,
raising their symphony
for wild instruments
under the verve of prayer.

Over the Hudson River
the cloud puts out a paw,
skyscrapers stretch
with the heat

the bees of the invisible
are bleached in sunlight,
If anyone is in Christ
he is a new creature.

Nothing is like
the anxiety of animals
waiting for Adam
to name them

yet some lie down
in the enclosed garden
as if the tree of charity
sprang from their breasts.
...

The moon is pale
as a hare's belly

so what trembles
the alert stillness

of this Egyptian hare
over a ripple of water

into running script?
...