At Notre Dame de Reims
John Burnside
the snake is a snake;
but the toad has a human face, in the hidden gallery under the roof, where the masons
practised their art, away from the bishops and kings.
We’ve seen this much before (in Salisbury, say, or that chapel above the Esk
at Rosslyn): a refuge for the pagan in the chill
of Christendom, a Green Man in the fabric of the stone; a running
boar; the sacred hare; or else
the common wren, so lifelike it might flit at any time
into a corner, tail erect, the eye
agleam, as if to indicate its known propensity
for lust (which, in the old tongue, meant no more
than pleasure: no-one’s shame and not a sin,
but life as such, immediate and true
like flight, or song).
At Reims, they say,
the toad is done from life - sans doute
un proche - a relative or friend,
and high in the highest beams, where no one goes,
a workman has sculpted a cat with a woman’s smile.
It’s cold in here: a memory
of life, not life itself,
but just as the light that falls through the stained-glass
windows falls to scattered points of colour in the dark,
not from a god, but from a common memory of being
lost amongst the trees, old demons
watching from the murk, some errant body
flitting back and forth from light to dark
till something more familiar than a god
escorts the wanderer home – no shame in that,
nor any sin: a rabbit for the pot, a brace of quail,
and nothing to confess, should there be warmth
and laughter in the house (a hut, no more,
under the cold facade their hands have raised
to someone else’s god, a stone conclusion,
while the old life bides its time)
nothing to be refused, where there is hearth
and humour and the fleet
mysterium that runs from skin to skin:
a mischief in the eye, a sly remark,
a live cat lapping the cream
while the stew-pot simmers.
