Some months ago I was staying with friends in the north of England at
Harnham, a short line of cottages leading up to an ancient manor
farmhouse on a sandstone hill one hour outside Newcastle. ON the STREET there are all kinds of conventions, rules if you like, for how we go about our business, walking the pavement, crossing the road, even lying in the gutter if that is where we want to be, and in houses too, and my friends with whom I was staying are a Buddhist community, monks, and as you would expect they have their rules too. Waiting is one of the things that happens frequently with my friends and has its rules, and one ordinary Sunday morning –
I wanted to describe this,
the doorway
and everyone who had gone
in before,
stepping over the threshold
and entering
a
solidity through the very thick of the angle,
And I wanted to describe
the whole house,
but from an empty corridor
running along
outside the white wall, and
inside the people
sat on the floor, some on
their knees, hands
In prayer, not that, still
faces lifted towards the real
because all roads lead
there, and I was too,
my dishonest memory sat
back against the stairs
drumming,
the spinning drum of the machine upstairs.
– ‘entering a solidity’, in other words I was aware of what felt like an impossible weight of facts, and yet I was also being given something, something very precious, and from the puzzle of my particular position an opportunity to actually see how the rules worked.
mmj