Cold House

Time leached through these walls, left fragments of history traced
On scarred woodwork and the brittle rags of furnishings;
Time’s passing left echoes behind the skirtings, tiny noises
Like an infestation of lost days and dismembered moments.

One hundred and sixty years have been buried
In these stones, under these planks and boards;
The rafters and beams creak beneath the weight.

Plaster cracked and crumbled; door-frames buckled;
The doors themselves warped; locks loosened and the wind
Rattled them, then swirled in eddies round the empty fireplaces.

Chimneys breathed in and out as rain fell, pooling in the grates;
Wind blew in through cavities and spiralled in the flues.

Shifting skies chilled and warmed the house, season by season;
Summer’s heat, its midnight light; winter’s rain, storm and squall;
Darkness shrouded everything in time.

Yes, time: not the spring-wound click of hands upon a face,
Not counted days in calendar squares where dates are ringed:
Not those high and holy, milestone days, our mapped futures passing,
And the present, gone, all in the past, memory abandoned.

History, then, the secret time of what goes unremembered;
Like the cold, it slides deeper in the cracks between stones,
Replaces mortar with crumbs; what lives there now is thin
Like evidence, like footprints worn in rock, faint scratches
And striations, reminders or puzzle pieces waiting
To stir recollection or to reassemble events as deeply buried
As these foundations, still sinking down into the earth.

Did anyone live here, where there is only ruin and distance?
Living seems of no great consequence. We are all like buildings,
Trying to endure, hoping to pass unnoticed, to slip, perhaps
Into history or fable, but finally into rubble.

Even on the dullest day in the bleakest month there is shelter
By the wall; even when lintels have fallen, when hearth
And chimney breasts stand open to the seven elements
And the empty sky, there is shelter.

Put a hand on the cold stone and through its wet shape you can feel
The mason’s hand still on it, the heft of it laid with a kind of love
In a hollow of the masonry beneath. In your hand geology is threaded
With a human strand of time; there is residual warmth as though cold
Never quite returned, as if living leaves a mark for a touch to find.

This cold house is not as cold as quarried stone.
Roofless, all wooden beams stripped or gone to dust,
Even as a mound in the heather, the earth is still shaped by it;
The wind still turns aside as it blows;
The wind, as time, never truly still.

© BH, 2017

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Ruins again. Well, we live among the truth of time passing. Despite our fragile notions of permanence. Let's face it, we're up to our necks in change, always have been. There are some who would have us believe their vision of change moves us from one permanence to another. They have it wrong. There's always huge risk, uncertainty as we build and rebuild. Always our edifices go on crumbling. If there's any comfort (and I hope to have touched on it here) the piles of stone we leave behind still turn the breeze aside and provide a shelter for small creatures and blades of grass.

After all, these last may have more sense than we humans ever had.