The Hands

Busy and blindfold, taught their trade by trial and touch, they are naturals, eager exponents of every half-formed thought, or of no thought. Getting bored, they twiddle their thumbs or tap, thinking that you are thinking nothing, waiting to run an errand to pen or pocket.

The devil, we say, finds work for idle hands. Idle heads will dream their own contraptions but wreak no havoc till hands are called to service: hands in hatred of hands hammered iron nails into the palms, twisted a crown, offered the dice their chance to make decision.

The pride of heads denies them understanding then reaches out a hand to prove the world,explain its music and articulate precise intelligence of love. The dark, the silent, all comply to the hand's order, make their confession to the fingertips

as honest as those bluntly-put enquiries. No artists, they'll create by mere assuming as they assume you now, love, substance you out of the night's negations. Magic of touch, you're there again. I feel you reach towards me. The darkness round us sings the praise of hands.

Green Man: Winchester Cathedral

Eyes do not notice the hand's acknowledgement, burnish of caressed oak or whose face you touch as you step down from the choir stalls.

You walk between his two masks: brow moulded back into leaves, eyelet-holes between the fronds, foliate lip and beard — a savage concentration

stares out of the wood towards the high altar. Barely noticed between choir and nave he guards our comings and goings —

a part of the mystery.

Did man fall and rise by a tree? Over all our world the forests are burning.

This church is founded on brushwood.

Russet Apples

Lie back against the pillows: and again, as if for the first time, I give you a russet apple.

In our country the custom is love first, and then apples: a ritual celebration of our unhoped-for return after aeons of wandering where there was nobody, or the next best thing —

some lover who didn't care enough to let it be right; some man who wouldn't trust, some woman who didn't dare; where always she was hiding a hate, or he had to fondle an image to help him get it on.

Now we've passed the gate, the land is ours again and the apple's into the secret; feel how it loves us as you bite and the juice comes, cider-sweet, leaf-sour, and the rusty bronze skin gleams wet in candle light,

and feel when I kiss you how within the mouth's dark space there is no I or you but only a fragrance of endless orchards that waited here, always ripening, longing to welcome us back into paradise.

'The Hands' and 'Russet Apples' are from Tourists (Carcanet Press, 1981) and 'Green Man' from A Prismatic Toy (Carcanet Press, 1987), Copyright Grevel Lindop, and are reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.