Still Frame - Claire McQuerry

The film is a double, but we leave
before the second half, coats thin

against late March snow. In Saint Giles
churchyard lamplit ice glazes headstones

and early blooms. We are five
crossing before the headlights of a taxi. Yesterday,

they were 129, mothers' sisters
and friends' children's fathers stopped

in a torn heartbeat of steel and flesh.
"Four and a half stars," you say, and add

that the empty swimming pool
symbolized sterility,

not death. "If you wait, the fragments make
sense in the end." A newspaper stiffens

in the gutter, and my toes, first needled
with cold, have stopped their signals

completely. Benicio Del Toro has just shot
Sean Penn on screen. (Blood, slivered glass,

cutaway). Somewhere, car doors slam like distant
explosions, and I am waiting

for the cue to deliver my lines. Snow
is falling on the mounded

grass of Saint Giles churchyard--backlit--
while daffodils freeze in the wind-rustled night.

In Reoccurring Nature - Ann Foreyt

I have planted such faces in my dreams
Such nightmares have been planted in my waking.
Discarded into moonlight and
Tripped up in bike spokes
Flick-flick-flick
Like the cards we used to place;
Reoccurring faces with swords.
Cyclical, until the motion stops,
Reaching a destination
Or a curious tripping.


The Lady Washington - Ann Foreyt

Somewhere
(perhaps in a treasured keepsake
from a time to remember or in
a shoebox of forgotten images)
There is a tall ship, sailing motionless
in paper and million-hued ink.

Her sails hum in the wind, awash
in the sisal music of cordage and stays,
and she glides upon the Sound
silently.
A canvas tune, marred by no engine-roar.

How could anyone resist this,
The graceful transgression of a Lady among yachts?
Families wave and halloo, pointing
As lithe figures clamber up
and down the ratlines.
Self-consciously, consciously on parade.

Trying to capture a bit of history, of novelty,
the gut-lurch of awe,
Photos were snapped and video was shot.
What stories may be told in private settings?
Who may appreciatively study such scenes?

Did anyone also notice a girl, bandanna askew,
Curled on the bowsprit, entranced by the sea?
Caught in the wave of fascination,
anonymously,
A literal hanger-on of a grand anachronism.

I am not staring from a Time-Life feature,
An icon of revolution or a cultural ideal.
I am merely that blue-and-grey form
In the corner of a Kodak moment
Buried in an personal album
somewhere.
He talked scarves

Talking to Yourself - John Morey Maurice

He talked scarves
Hand woven in Ireland
Subtle tones and textures
Crossing over, through, under, and back

He talked sports coats
Hand tailored in England
Cut, drape, style, and look

He talked ties
Handmade in Italy
Imported silk, stripes, dots, and patterns

He talked with obvious passion
While I listened
Without

Stories I Never Told - Iain Bernhoft

I lost many things
the day the wake grew big and
changed direction and overtook
the boat, tossing me like glass.
How I imagined electrical fire burning
my city block, and made knots from it.
And how the soft-pear girl with the slow summer drawl
wouldn't hush, as she was intolerably
not you. Or how warm the stone steps were
for a night without mosquitoes
and how the warmth came into the rum
we sipped from plastic cups, before
I walked the drunk girl home.
Or why the lights were out
in the train station and the cleanliness
of churches. And I was going to tell you
that I hadn't ever visited the covered market,
and that I cared about the importance of things.
But all this was before
I learned that the fire was spent, how
silence is more unbearable than speech,
that the world is a plurality of not you,
and that the lights would not be turned back on.

MY GREEN ROOM - Brooke Matson

Not one
will remember how oil and water spilled
across their heads
as their parents held them over it

and they will wonder,
when they have wider eyes, who
these people are and why

we clapped as their names were called
to candles on a Sunday morning.

And your name I keep in my green room
where it lingers along the window sill
looking outwards.
It seemed wrong

even to post it scrawled
on the envelope in our box--

such a dim candle
that coats each unremembered dream with pearl
to weight the branches of the dark.

In the fresh wake
of a summer morning, the leaves of birches
handle your name, a silver coin
among their jade,

the way you spilled my loneliness--
a widening chasm
between sun and shadow--

that is where I wait
and what presses your voice between
the cover and the page:

a word

as buoyant to the evening
as the speech of leaves.

That is where I wait,
or maybe

the absence of your voice
drapes the walls with bronze
and flame, what unfolds

the fragrance of your name to consecrate
this space, to part

all my words from light
as stained glass swallows
this unlit church.

Peacock Proof - Tony Wadden

"What light falls from us promises to rise,"
you claim. "Our garden sunset's not the end;
we dawn ever in twilight's sacrifice."

"Look there! The shaded peacock streams surprise.
His pulsing luminescent scarf portends
light falling from us promises to rise."

"Spirited bird, no coop could stay his cries,
his crave to roam, his legend to ascend
dawning ever in twilight's sacrifice."

"See fan and crest the dying rays baptize
with gleam, and feel his sleek and strut transcend
in what light falls promising to rise."

"His cobalt-blue shimmers! Before our eyes
he dims, rekindles, burning to expend
dawning ever in twilight's sacrifice."

A stalk snaps! The peacock heaves and flies,
bedusked, as I am, rousing to perpend
your promise--light falls from us, yet we rise
to dawn ever in twilight's sacrifice.

For I Will Consider after Christopher Smart - Beth Cooley

For I will consider my rabbit Scout
For he illustrates in microcosm the great world
For his tiny yawn echos the hurricane
For his incisors curve like slips of new moon at the pink of evening
For his fur mounds like snow over tundra, white and brown
For his animated nose siphons from air all scents delectable and mundane
For each ear moves of its own accord latitudinally and longitudinally
for each inscribes an arc of one hundred and twelve degrees

For he preens like the birds of the air, his nape a feathered ruff
For his claws grow and yellow like the tusks of great beasts
For his whiskers recall fine bones of the salmon or trout
For in reaching to scratch his haunches he squeaks like a rodent
For the squirrels know not what to make of him
for which he gives thanks

For he illustrates contentment and abundance of peace
For he stretches forth his paws, his rump aft in the air
For in his ablutions he fails to reach his scut yet never despairs
For he bounds through tall grass or tufted snow with equal abandon
For he tucks himself into a neat dozing loaf
For he lies on his side and suckles his paws in deep sleep
for he dreams of his furry infancy

For he illustrates intelligence and grace beyond his species
For he lifts daintily the rose petal and daintily wipes his pink lips with his paw
For he flees from the lettuce bed at the first sign of detection
For he eats the pine needle from point to stem
For he nibbles the maple leaf indifferently
For he devours all young tender pea shoots
for which he is reprimanded

For all that he illustrates,
for all that he is, I consider my rabbit Scout.

Desafinado: Lovesong to a Lovesong
Sing my soul, Desafinado, my love
And forever, its yours, baby
Your melodious curves, sweet ocean waves
somewhere far south where winter winds
give way to 3/2 clave beats.
I mark time in you, waiting
to be swept up, swept along,
steal my breath away, Desafinado
My saxophone soul is yours.
Hold me, singing yourself into my mind
and down into my toes, tapping
morse signals of my desire.
I'll hold you in my heart forever,
wishing I could hold you my arms,
or in my hands, my breath moving you
across the finest Caribbean cane,
through pearl and dull, laquerless brass
(every bit as precious to me as Spanish gold)
and out, my love, into the world
to sing the souls of others.

Freedom From Supposed - John Cummings

I'll merely start with basic imagery:
A miner in his mine, delving for gems.
Applying meaning, though, I'll be outdone:
The plainness falters if you read of them.

Here, you have sinned already in this way
I've said but "miner" and you've added more,
You gave him clothes or hat that I left out.
You've taken what was mine and made it yours.

Though this my mine, which you have made a "yours,"
Till you have read does not even exist,
Your touch kills all, the mine and man inside.
Thusly usurped, all hope I have is this:

To die and to rob you of your sonnet.

Broccoli and Cherry Pie - Leah Rourke

circa…1922, 1958, 1986, 2013…
Sitting at the kitchen table
with my chair scooted in tight,
my legs don't reach the linoleum
and dangle

not moving
in smooth motion,
disjointed from my hands
that play a sour game
of hot potato with my head.

My brothers and sisters play in the
living room, finished with their dinners.
Only stubbornness and broccoli
stand between me, the cherry pie for dessert,
and my toys in the next room.

No, this isn't punishment.

My mother sits with me,
as if she remembers what it is like
to not want her vegetables
yet so desperate for
that pie or pudding or cookie,

even helping me by
wrapping her hand around mine
gripped on the fork when I
don't think I can chew another bite.

We are the same, she and I

wanting the prize, followed by freedom
(in the living room)
willing to stare down
the enemy until not noticing
we've pierced and swallowed it whole.

Autopsy - Ann Foreyt
A mole on the back
Of her ear.

Some day
It would have been
A lover's resting place.

Now
It is only another
"Distinguishing mark".

Spinning - Mollie Harsch

Here I am a joke; but I bring the joke
To life; I spin it like a nickel on

A counter at a penny candy store.
A shivering shiny menace in a

Penny candy world. Spins past the almond
Roca apple fritter fatter farther

Till it too gives up. Stops and falls to its
Stomach on the marble surface of an

Undefeated front. It lies, it lies,
And refuses this frivolous revolt.

In the end my protest made no change at
All; it was only a distraction.



Steel Cold and Rusted - Greg Sullivan

The sign doesn't say
this is just another rustbelt town
where you walk lonely on the gravel
between the railway tracks.

Mikey at thirty seven still stakes
a claim at 43rd and Roosevelt
with a cocked hat and switchblade.

All the denim and boot mill employees spew out of sad bars
with neon lights that still play St. Louis blues
and Tom Waits on juke boxes sadder than the bars themselves.

Daily Jim Hill sits out back
on splintered white wood smoking and drinking
Southern Comfort staring at the trains leaving
wishing he was too.

Fridays the farmers ride the main drag
as if from a dream
on tractors slower than breathing.

The local bar near the mill
is the only church
attended.

No, the sign doesn't tell you any of this
but chipped flowers and creaking smiles
reminisce of ghostly times.

Jim Hill knows that's a lie, he was here.
Mikey, child of the town, drunk
doesn't know and doesn't think
he believe in happiness.

Tomorrow, Jim Hill will leave.
The trains will be there, why shouldn't they take
Mr. Hill along on their shoulders?

Assuming Hill isn't drunk
in a ditch, hidden in overgrown grass and lulled by
the rackety clicks and rusted spins of those very same trains
empty of him.

Mikey will die in a fight tomorrow, he will pick it
outside his territory,
and Jim Hill won't leave.

The workers will move, like clouds, in clumps
from openings in factories together towards bars
where they leak out to dissipate and
go home un-welcomed to wives
and children asleep.

Hill's train, a failed rescue,
arrives on-time
between the glass towers
filled with rigid, Swedish furniture
in a throbbing, cosmopolitan city.

Through a glass frame
writers retain fully the town's face
and an ink born from obsession
sketches this steel-cold portrait.

maria goretti - Kristin Deasy

there is a soft quiet place between the collarbone
white and tender like
the opening of a flower
shaken by the breeze in a laugh
and hanging just above the heartbeat

its pulse was taken
by a silver finger on a chain;
a fingerprint from long ago
pressing cold on my breathing
a silver finger flicking switches
thoughts all in pretty disarray
and clinking close like magnets
with ends together: the saints aren't made of plaster

all this in a matter of moments
just enough to take a pulse
and that silver finger
it was only a metal medal on a chain
not, i guess, a farmgirl singing, "quattordici"
fourteen fast; nineteen oh two
tracing bloody circles in my mind
fingerpainting heartbeats with tarnish'd touch
crying up a snowbank on a sunday afternoon
martyr for purity
martyr for what?

for that warm quiet place between the collarbone
white and tender like
a lily

Note: St. Maria Goretti
Patron of youth, young women, purity, and victims of rape. Typically portrayed holding a lily. Born in Corinaldo, Ancona, Italy, on October 16, 1890. In 1902 an eighteen year old neighbor, Alexander, grabbed her from her steps and tried to rape her. When Maria said that she would rather die than submit, Alexander stabbed her 14 times with a knife. She is called a martyr because she fought against Alexander's attempts at sexual assault. Alexander was captured and sentenced to thirty years. He was unrepentant until he had a dream that he was in a garden, and Maria was there and gave him flowers.

Summer - Brooke Matson

Three nights
I wound slow around the room
with the shadows, and I am ashamed to tell you

for two nights after
I drank myself to sleep
when the others had gone for Seattle and baseball.

This morning
I watered the garden.
I took the kitchen scissors

and snipped the heads off all the roses,
the grass blotted with bright stones,
the dark beats of a heart, their lips

still wet--

The less browned I will lay
on the steps of the back door.
The cry of a crow

fades into the sun's brightness.
Though dizzy, I vow

to cut out the tongue
of the next thing I murder.

Suicide is Painless - Ann Pukstas

He slammed the front door of his midtown high-rise apartment and threw his keys onto the satin couch with enough force to make them bounce onto the oriental carpet. He stood still in the middle of the living room panting heavily with his eyes darting from one object to the next in quick succession, trying to find something to focus on for longer than a second. If it had not been for the dirt tracks left by tears on his face, he would have seemed dashingly handsome in that Gatsby sort of way.

How could she have done this to him? He stood still a moment longer trying to control the rage that wanted to burst from every pore in his body. He stomped the twenty-six steps to the bathroom with such energy that he knew he would get another note from old Mrs. McCarthy downstairs tomorrow morning. That didn't matter now. Nothing did.

Once in the bathroom, he gripped both sides of the porcelain sink until his knuckles were white. His head down, he exhaled loudly into the sink three times as his therapist had told him to do. Seeing his miniature self reflected in the polished gold faucet, he lifted his head to stare critically at himself in the mirror. Repeating over and over in his head was the tune from M*A*S*H, Suicide is painless.

He filled the basin with cold water and plunged his face in. Trying to make the song go away, he focused on his heartbeat. But all he could hear was, "Lau-ra, Lau-ra." He stayed under until his lungs were ready to collapse and came up gasping. He rubbed his face with the fluffy blue towel marked "His" and turned back to the mirror. He searched for some flaw or imperfection. Any sort of clue to explain what she had done.

He switched off the light and walked through the hallway lined with smiling pictures of the two of them and into the cold kitchen. The pictures reminded him of the way he wanted to remember her, not like in the morgue with the toe tag and her corpse covered so he wouldn't have to see her body all smashed from the impact. Flicking the light on, he went to the fridge for some milk. Laura always had milk before going to bed. She said that it helped her sleep. It was worth a shot.

He drank the milk right out of the carton for the first time in two years--Laura had never let him. He looked down on the counter and saw the travel brochures that she had laid out for him to look at that night. They had never had the chance to go on a honeymoon and she'd always wanted to go to Australia. The outback. He saw the glossy pictures of smiling, tanned people; a couple on a jet ski with the woman's arms tight around the man's waist. Pushing them away, he replaced the milk in the refrigerator. Suicide is painless, he found himself humming.
Realizing that sleep was not going to come for some time, he slumped back into the living room and turned on the TV to see if there was anything to distract him and get the damn song out of his head. He pressed the button for the Tivo to see what had been recorded recently. Instantly, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt came onto the screen.

I want you to hit me as hard as you can.

Fight Club. It wasn't a movie that most people thought Laura would have liked, but she watched it all the time when it was on TV. She couldn't stand the violence and swearing in the DVD version so she watched it on FX. He had always seen it as a movie about violence. She was the philosopher who argued that it was about transcendence over the material and reaching a higher sense of enlightenment. The Narrator tries to kill himself in the end to get rid of his alter ego. Suicide is painless.

He sat there and watched for a few minutes skipping to the parts he liked. What was he going to do now? Go on as if nothing happened? Become a priest in Moscow? Travel the world? He hit "Play".

That old saying, how you always hurt the one you love? Well, it works both ways.

He remembered that she had a gun at one point. She bought it back before they were together when she still lived by herself on the rough side of town. He found himself getting up and walking numbly into the study where her desk was. Pulling open the upper left drawer, he found the old Colt .45. He let the heaviness of the gun weigh his arm at his side. He carried the gun back to the kitchen, grabbed the travel magazines from the counter, and walked back into the living room.

Sitting himself back on the couch he put his feet on the edge of the glass coffee table. The magazines were on his lap and the Colt made his right hand seem dead and lifeless next to him on the couch.

A story of stones Town of Binsey, Oxfordshire, England - Claire McQuerry

For me, the story of St. Margaret's Church begins with a man and a woman, pilgrims arriving on bicycles, late one February afternoon. All other stories, future and distant past, spool away from this one moment like colored film, and in my mind this is the anchor point. Perhaps I cannot view this history as a linear progression because the churchyard holds time, not as a simple thread, stretching before and behind, but as something somehow deeper and thicker, existing in faint traces all at once. A palimpsest it might be called--nine hundred years of voices in homily and prayer and benediction, of kneelings and risings and opening of doors and shuffling of pages, of funeral processions and christenings, of cut flowers and candles and altar cloths, of miraculous healings, and of pilgrims. Processions of pilgrims.

From the village of Binsey, they would have appeared tiny, cresting the hill near Port Meadow. I imagine the bicycle pilgrims, two figures pressed between verdant pastures and a sky the color of bone. They would have followed a footpath to the edge of the grazing land, where a gate opens onto the lane that curls into Binsey Township. Then there is the furrowed dirt road cut across by mulberry branches, the broad lime avenue, and at last the gate to the churchyard.

The first sound I heard was the crush of dry pine needles beneath their tires. I watched as they leaned their bicycles against the Norman stonework of the doorframe and entered the vestibule.

The light inside was especially muted that day, casting a pale gray glow onto the whitewashed walls, obscuring the corners and dark wood beams of the ceiling. The man and woman must have knelt to pray on the sole-smoothed stones of the floor, breathing in the St. Margaret's earthy scent. I don't remember how long they stayed, but when they stepped into the churchyard again they both appeared lighter somehow, as if they had set down a weighty load on the pews inside.

The two walked to the west of the churchyard, where a border of stones encircle six steps that sink into the earth--St. Margaret's well. From the distance, these stones look like another grave, and this is what I thought as I watched the woman that first day, descending until her head disappeared below the ground. When she came up again, resurrected into February cold, her cheeks were wet, and she didn't speak as she took her bicycle from the man and slipped dark sunglasses out of a jacket pocket.

And here, also, when those maimed and unsound folke had bin cured either by bathing in, or drinking of this water, hung up their crutches as a special memorandum of their cured griefs.

It was rumored that at one time the town of Binsey held twenty inns to accommodate the pilgrims who came to take St. Margaret's treacle waters. ("Treacle," in its oldest sense, means "antidote" or medicinal compound.) Excavations have uncovered the foundations of only one inn, so the report is an exaggeration. But that the well attracted a great many pilgrims has never been debated.

Though I have tried, I can find no written account of particular healings, no testimonials or half-truths-become-rumor-become-myth. I can only imagine, taking what I've read of medieval miracle stories, and in part this fulfils my need to know: the blind woman, guided to the waters, who cupped her hands to drink, and opening her eyes, saw sunlight in the yew tree and six steps of stone leading up and out. The man, daughter dying at home, who rode 200 miles for the water that would save her life. Or the barren wife, who drank from the well and lived to bear ten children, become so healthy and strong into old age that she outlived them all.

I was in Oxford studying when I first learned about Binsey. My friend Elizabeth had decided to take up jogging. At first these trips would be short, a run to the bakery a few blocks away, or a jog around the Oxford parks. Later she began disappearing mysteriously for hours. These were the days, I came to learn, that she ran out to Binsey. She would stop at the church and lie on the cool stones of the floor inside, closing her eyes until, in that silence that is not the silence of an empty room, she could feel every joint in her body, her skin against the stone, and the way her heart pulsed beneath her ribs. Until she became aware of every stone in the floor, even the ones she was not touching.

The door to Binsey Church is never locked. Not even in the small hours of the morning or very late into the night. Perhaps it is the remoteness of the village--a 40-minute walk out of Oxford and a mile west of the Thames River--that keeps the church from being vandalized, or raided, or inhabited by the homeless. On the other hand, apart from the small donations box at the doorway, there is not much of value inside, and maybe, I would like to think, the caretakers would not mind if a homeless man or woman spent a night there to keep warm.

The church receives many visitors, but it is used for services only occasionally: Mass on Christmas and Easter and on Saint Margaret's Day, a few weddings and funerals, a spoken evensong, intermittently, on Sundays from April to October. The services at night are lit by candles and oil lamps-St. Margaret's is one of the few remaining English churches that has not been wired for electric lights--and during the day, the interior is illuminated by the clean, clear light that filters through the leaded glass.

Air within those walls carries the earthy scent of damp stone and the sharp, holy smell of buildings that have been long occupied but unchanged. Time seems to have tempered the very molecules of these structures themselves. The stones and wood beams take on a character--they build up a patina, not simply of crusted age but of experience, moments out of lives.

I read a guidebook to Canterbury Cathedral that explains how the northwest transept, popular with tourists as the site where Thomas À Becket was murdered, was actually reconstructed in the late 14th century, more than 200 years after the saint's death, so that most of what one sees today would not have been there as Becket was fatally stabbed by King Henry's knights. However, there are several stones in the north wall that are original to the early structure, so that these stones, the guidebook says, would have "witnessed" the murder. It is this idea that I am trying to articulate. It is the idea that in such old buildings there is a real sense that place holds experience, that the very stones and wood and glass of the structure build an intangible link with the people and events of the past.

Like all good ancient buildings, Binsey church has a legend. The legend begins very long ago, in the late seventh century, and speaks of a beautiful princess who became a nun. The princess's name was Frideswide, and her father, Dydda, was a Mercian king and ruler of the upper Thames Valley. Frideswide was pure of heart, the legend goes, and her father, who kept his court at Oxford, dedicated great acreage at the city's edge to the princess and twelve companions, who lived there in a convent he had built for them.

The women lead quiet, devoted lives in seclusion and chastity for quite some time, until the unfortunate day that Frideswide's wealth and beauty were reported to King Aelfgar of Leicester. Before long, a messenger arrived at the convent with gifts and a flattering proposal of marriage for the princess. Kindly, Frideswide declined.

King Aelfgar, who was clearly unaccustomed to rejection, flew into a fabulous rage and decided to attack the convent and steal the princess away by force. Before his plans could be consummated however, Dydda's spies got word of the proposed attack, and a warning was sent to Frideswide, who fled. Some say she fled on foot to the safety of Oxford, others that she came to the Thames River, where a white-robed figure ferried her downstream to the oak forest at Abingdon.

In the forest, Frideswide found an abandoned pigsty and converted it into an oratory, living there safely until Aelfgar attacked the city of Oxford. The people of Oxford, fearing for their homes, opened the city gate for the king, and told him of the secret oratory in the woods, where he immediately marched with his men. When she saw that the king had discovered her hiding place, Frideswide prayed a desperate prayer, and immediately Aelfgar was struck blind.

In the other version, the king attacked the city where Frideswide was hiding and managed to break down the gate himself. Upon entering the Oxford walls, he was struck blind, and Frideswide fled to the forest.

In either case, the good princess took pity, and prayed again, to St. Catherine, or to St. Margaret, or she struck a staff against the earth-perhaps all three--and a spring with healing powers erupted from the ground. She bathed the king's eyes in the waters, and immediately his sight was restored. And so Aelfgar returned to his own lands in the deepest contrition.

Frideswide became a saint. She lived until October, 735, and when she died, a shrine was erected over her grave and was visited by many pilgrims. Pilgrims journeyed also to Frideswide's well, beside which a church, St. Margaret's, had been built. There the healing waters restored the travelers' sight, and there they hung up their crutches by the door.

Which version of the story is truer, and how much of it happened? I like to believe it is all true. That the people of Oxford protected the princess and that they betrayed her, that she hid in a pigsty and in a palace, that there was time when nothing, even contradictions, were too fantastical to exist.

One midnight in May, Elizabeth and I decided to take an excursion out to Binsey with a small group of friends, candles, and books of poetry. We took turns passing the candles and the books and reading so that our voices echoed in the darkness and flickering light against the stones.

After this we came back many times. When we couldn't find matches we would bring flashlights, sometimes cider in thermoses and olives from the Oxford market. On one occasion we brought a friend along who does not read poetry but sings with a choir. Candles extinguished, she stood in the dark and began "Byrd one Brere," a Middle English love song. Her voice split through the dark of that church in high, clear notes, and I wondered, with shivers running down my spine, if such words had been sung within these walls before. Many years ago. If the memory remained, caught the mossy crevices of stone.

I only sat in St. Margaret's churchyard to read on one occasion, that very first day. I leaned against the large yew tree--all old churchyards in England, almost without exception, have yew trees--struggling with the dense Middle English of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and thinking of how the yew tree must be as old as the story, the cut Norman stones of the door arch even older.
I also thought of how Lewis Carroll had sat in this same churchyard to read and write, how St. Margaret's Well is the treacle well that appears in Alice in Wonderland. At the tea party, the Dormouse tells Alice that three sisters live at the bottom of the well and draw up all manner of things that begin with M, "such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness." And this appeared also in the palimpsest of Binsey Church. I turned my face to the weathered stone and listened.