in Studies Twilight Landscape
for Celeste Miller
That was not a dream, the thick grove at midnight,
and the leaves dancing in the August air, there in a place of gods,
or at least of altars, facing west, where the river met the sea.
Trees grow in rings on the hills, like stones.
Goats still graze in the smaller fields, behind hedges,
and white dogs run in the lanes at dusk.
But the country was meant for sleep, in the carved hill at Lydney,
where the Celtic pilgrims were healed once by darkness.
If gods still live in the bodys dream,
or one god, say, entwined in the spinal nerves
with unexpected nymphs, or disruptive shadows,
then it is you I wake to in sleep and memory
in the country where late sunlight and summer music
are stairs to a visionary sea. Dolphins leap offshore,
roses shower in season like small dense flames,
but you cannot see the animals, or the doves in the screen of ferns.
Seashells break under your naked feet,
and the air smells of fish until the path leaves the river.
Then the road climbs inland among broken rocks
littered with leaf mold, and at the end of it
is another altar, three women in cloaks
so worn with rain that they cant be identified.
The Celtic pilgrims were healed once by darkness in the carved hil at Lydney because there was a temple of Nodens there. Nodens was a sea-god who nevertheless was also the source of an Aesculapius-like cult of ritual healing through sleeping in cubicles at the gods shrine, which was within sight of the sea in the West Country of England, a land characterized by hedges, narrow lanes, and tales of ghost dogs. The ring of trees on the hill that resembled stone the circles of Englands west country, however is in Sussez, at Chanctonbury Ring. The trees, indeed, enclose the ruins of a Celtic temple to an unknown deity. The visionary dolphins, seasheels, doves in the ferns, and nymphs are all associated with the cult of Aphrodite, who here appears as living in the bodys dream where all godly visios start (a very different take on the problem from Yeats foul rag-and-bone-shop of the heart in The Circus Animals Desertion). The rainworn triad in cloaks is an emblem found on many Romano-British altars of the same era as the temple of Nodens; the three goddesses are Celtic, not the three fates or the three graces, and an uncertain pagan trinity they are, too, mother goddesses, most likely, but who knows for sure. By the way, Nodens is not the god of the Great Deep or Abyss, as far as I can tell; he appears in a made-up altar dedication in Arthur Machens symbolist tale The Great God Pan., close by a similarly infuential Lovecraft story in ...