In Bath Abbey, watching them tune
the grand piano for Rick Wakeman's concert.
Arches and buttresses pulling you up
almost against your will
toward heaven.

Having spent yesterday underground in the old Roman baths,
it's particularly dense today to know this site was a pagan
place of worship and prayer before them, and now
it's a Christian church: this same prayer circle in this same marsh
generating steam and generating prayers since the dawn
of human time.
All that soul going out like a laser
forever.

On a small patch of dry lawn, eating a Cornish pasty
with the pigeons. Laundry soap
in the city fountain. Jane Austin's house
down the road; though she hated Bath, the love her.

On the road. A sign:
FRESH
PET MEAT
DAILY.

Heading across the mystical countryside, we see Peter Gabriel's house.
And there's Solsbury Hill, where he climbed and decided to quit Genesis.
Thus, "I walked right out of the machinery." It's tall--no wonder
his heart was going BOOM BOOM BOOM.

We stop and walk through Lacock. Step back 700 years
in the town barn. See the house somebody in Harry Potter movies lives in.
The kids react; I don't know what they're talking about.

St. Cyriac's church. A lovely old flower lady is arranging flowers. She tells us
tales of royal weddings. Prince Charles sat right there! No, there!
The greatest redunadant sign is on the wall:
PLEASE PUT MONEY
FOR FLOWERS IN THE CHURCH
IN THE CHURCH.
The flower lady tells us that anti-terorr sniffer dogs following Charles around
peed on the carpets.

Sword marks from when Henry VIII
had religious symbols
cut down from the church
are still visible in the walls.
Chayo goes into the cemetery and picks and apple off a tree.

Sheep!

Thatched roofs!

In the fields, a great white chalk horse
carved in the sod!

And real white horses that look like
they're carved out of chalk!

House sign:
SOD THE DOG
BEWARE
OF THE KIDS.

Madonna's house is next door to Sting's house.
In golden fields of barley.
Chayo has never heard of Sting.
Tempus fugit.

Cheddar cheese, my kids are delighted to learn,
comes from Cheddar.

You're driving down the road, and suddenly it appears.
An apparition.

Loving Stonehenge. Blind to tourists. Deaf to traffic.
Bitter wind.
Moody low clouds.
Crows circling the monoliths.
The mad endless loops of
squabbling Pink Floyd meadowlarks.

Heinous gift store crowds--rubber Stonehenges.

6,000 years of howling in the wind.

Squadrons of crazy little brown mottled birds fuss in the clover
while I write at this forgotten bench.

Everything around me has fallen
into an eerie time loop, and it keeps repeating:
this wind gust,
the small black cloud speeding by,
the ravens bowing to the stones,
the call of the lark repeating and repeating
exactly the same over and over and over....

# posted by Luis @ 3:43 PM