Visit to a Cathedral After a Trip Round the World

In the west door for kings alone swung wide, 
the leather-padded wicket, left behind me 
stifling a gasp, expired. 

No more fresh air: 
I had entered the dim, mouldy, hollow hush 
of a dead church—the silence of the ‘grave 
and reverend’ sirs ghosting it in their gowns—
to penetrate the nave, transgress the transept, 
stumble the steps up, dive through a cervical rood-screen,
steal past the vacant Gibbonsry and across 
more steps, and teeter at the altar. No 
postern, no thoroughfare; 
no lady-chapel, paradise ovarian, 
or cloister to produce an Easter egg 
fusible with a faltering tongue of fire 
for second reformation: only a stone 
apse with a roof of stone; and no way out 
but birth or rebirth by return. 

Return? 
Why send yourself to Coventry? They dispence 
a ‘longing, lingering,’ backward, westward, modern 
conspective trick, a summary pastiche 
unrealized as you wander up their nave: 
your history and mankind’s all out of date

But, though not through the body of a cathedral, 
I found an eastward way out west, a western 
route back east, in time or place, travelling 
from the past-future’s predeterminate tense 
to a future through a past, from the Levant 
of Greeks, Jews, Muslims, India, Japan, 
to a temple between the desert and the Rockies, 
the route of the great trek, the site of Eden, 
the wood south of Palmyra where by faith 
a fourteen-year-old lad saw Father and Son, 
the white board farmhouse in whose upper room 
Joseph translated and in the room below 
my church was founded; and the Susquehanna 
whence, on a mid-May morning, from the swirling 
water the priesthood once again returned 
to earth, as the river blazed with prophecy, 
the leaves rejoiced, blessed, and a pima dove 
quietly in this east of the New World, 
orient in Occident, end with beginning, 
alighted. 

May/June, 1969