Cloister Walk
by Edward A. Dougherty

Perhaps it’s the sacred tree, a yew
permitted to grow in the courtyard,
a greeting as alive as any human;

perhaps it’s the way we enter the place 
through the graveyard, strangely contemporary
as the living continue to bring their dead

amid the roofless abbey ruin, where walls
have stood—hard to say how long—from misted-
over origins and through countless attacks;

or perhaps my heart’s been emptied,
sufficiently prepared to receive
the teachings of stone and open air.

─────

I stood a long while
before a grave
and its Celtic Cross,

before its wheel
and beams, facing
its embossed knots.

At the base of one:
an upright sign
of infinity, a double

loop stands
and leads up
into an outer band

that turns inward
and through 
the middle

of a circle 
it has yet to make.
Are these knots

saying we’re caught
forever in sin
and suffering?

─────

Hands on walls, I bowed under lintels,
followed stone corridors and climbed
stone stairs to the floor above,

all the while, despite the map (which I
took a picture of), I couldn’t locate myself
in nave or sacristy or choir.

Feeling granted audience by the yew
at the entrance, and challenge-blessed
by the Celtic Cross in the graveyard,

I went on, lost but also on the verge 
of awe, and so silenced and smiling.
Then, from a windowless chamber,

I stepped into the arched walkway
of the cloister, the square heart of things,
open-aired and roofless, inhabited

by another yew tree: living witness
to five centuries, to myths and rituals,
violence and ruin, to all the twists

of human cruelty and humble devotion.
Its silent sermon preaches the mystery
of the knots—the seeming maze

I was moving through and the life
I live: how time and eternity
turn, flowing through each other, endless

and forgiving, bounded and free,
revealing the body of paradox
which lives and dies and rises again. 

─────

One chamber I understand at a glance,
the upper rectangular room

with its great hearth. I can imagine
the robed monks gathered at table,

a long wooden communal board,
fire blazing, not for ornament

but for function, to mark the feast
of Saint Francis, brother and founder.

Francis was dead for hundreds of years
by the time the last stone was placed here

but he lives on through his order
and final words: “What the Lord gave me

to do, I have done. May God show you
what’s yours to do.” Likewise, we’ve all been 

commissioned, to find our way, guided
by firelight and candle, as those monks

must have, living their lives of shadows
and damp, of work and chants and prayer.

—unless they were the ones in residence
in an era when abbeys were attacked,

the faithful forced to stomp a crucifix
or the holy ones put to the sword.

Through the inward-facing wall, also
roofless, I see the yew tree in the cloister,

canopy now at eye-level, spreading wide,
its crown inclusive, its mission ever green.

─────

From the mists of history
and the depths of a dream, the founder
was commissioned
to build an abbey
on the Rock of Music. 

Neither he nor his retainers
nor we who enter the story
centuries later know what
such a rock is, nor where,
but he sent out his men,

so great was his faith. Or guilt.
Or ambition. They searched
mountain peaks and pitched
valleys, open plains
and rocky wastes,

and were about to give up
—note this moment of magic,
when our usual capacities
like strategy and logic
are exhausted—

that’s when they caught a scrap
of sound, a hum perhaps
rising up from the very ground,
or a girl’s voice giving
a sweet and haunting song,

or perhaps, in their desperation,
hollowed out and with only a tale
of failure to bring back, then
they heard within themselves
the song of being, the music

of all aliveness resonating
from head to foot, and beyond—
in the arch of sky and flow
of wind, in the earth itself
and the rocks, yes, these very rocks.