Withershins
In the village of Dent in Cumbria, a vampire is said to be buried in the church graveyard.
By this light, the faultline is red,
as if gnawed,
a maw of bleeding rock
open, a broken jaw
loose over the rusting dale
turning slowly in the autumn.
Silence sluices the cold gill
in webs of grey water light
while Simon Sorcerer, converted fool,
gives up his magick
to follow the invisible man,
anticlockwise to the winter sun.
Count the beasts
in the lost words, the wizard said.
We can count them true,
under the shadow of the fault:
Yan – once loved,
Tan – all lost,
Tetherer – whatever I was,
Petherer – I am no longer.
In the churchyard,
under the square tower,
in the cold rich rain,
the vampire is fixed
to a long unlife by an iron pin.
Old Hodgson, a long black insect:
grinning still, dog blood on his lips,
wet necked, a foot inside holy ground.
You, friend, can abandon your magick
under the blessed fell, dripping with light,
by the lime kiln's mossy roof,
a bath for green children.
Sorcerer, parched by the dry falls,
why give up spells that manifest
for a word, the rumour of a great man,
already dead, alive, and gone again?
But hope on, and lay down the old spells.
It is an old church do, a traditional rite,
for the lush green lady, changing hexes
for crosses, warming dead blood
in her warm stockinged thigh.
Laid heavy soft, after the wedding,
hungover, so warm, so warm over my
body, not daring to move.
Oh, this old harmony,
congruent to the drone
of the unrevealed threnody
in the drip, drip, drip in the bowl –
(it takes a brave man
to wear such white, clean trousers
past the age
of forty)
tumbling from the first floor window
past the luscious plum tree, into the Dee's
fossil beach, where dead white years
are millions embedded, minute galaxies,
older than a forgotten kiss
on the grains of the university steps.
These lips dead, peeled, and grown again
on the ragged mouth of the headland
between the limestone and the Silurian,
a life of cracks and falls and abrasions,
subversions, diversions, seen and unseen
like the whispering foam of the flowing river
or the tap, tap, tap of the typewriter
my father left,
his novel half done –
not novel, and not finished –
but still written, inside stories,
anecdotes, books, all the tiresome subsequent lies,
like the eyes that nose the barbed wire:
contained, stinking, uncounted, unnamed.
Simon the Sorcerer, sick, gone now, roving
by the plague village, a rumour under trees.
The hearths grassed over,
their paths grassed over, in the trees –
and this pinioned vampire,
undead, grins asleep and awake
now, alone of all his kind in the dale,
a life half lived, and half over.
See –
stock snuffle over the plot
where we will eventually lie.
We've stopped saying Hi
and begun to say Goodbye.
Yan, tan, tetherer, petherer.
We can count them over, 'til sleep.
The following all gone,
the worthy spells all gone.
Hush, now, wheesht,
we sleep soon, sorcerer, we soon sleep.
You need much memory to tell such lies,
soft weak fossil, curled against the fault line.
Philip Miller is a writer and poet based in Edinburgh. His poems have been published in print and online and his novels are The Blue Horse (2015), All the Galaxies (2017) and The Goldenacre (2022).