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. 

─────

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