Issue 33: John Goodby

from YORK WALLS WALK WORK

2 Robin Hood’s Tower

Up on the rampart then, let’s head out along the allure, but none of your agger swagger here; hold on to your hats, careful for cat-ice, tracking the rampart deasil parallel to the sloppy line of Gillygate backs  By crenel-and-merlon, defence and attack doubling, begin the broken rondure, taking the corporate liberty of walking on the Walls, towards a corner that was called Frost, then Bawing as bowing, base coignage to crook them SE  A Roman right angle where Angles are elided  Bishop Eborius known at Arles 314 CE now just a term for void and the church built to dip in Edwin with his folk as part of Pope Gregory’s master-plan all gone  Where did Alcuin's lofty walls and shining Alma Sophia surge from our brief Northumbrian dawn?  None knows or will ever  Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras  Too-torn heart of a fitful see, see; where no-one is free from fear  Respect, RIP Paulinus and Egbert and Ælberht’s library under Wand that wonder of the West  Some matter ought to remain stuck in the muck  18’ of black sponge, archaeology’s Dark Ages Dark Matter between our level and the basilica where Constantine was proclaimed imperator once attributed to flood and dire apocalypse is now a cumulative humbler oblivion: skin eggshells parasite eggs worms seeds faeces chitin fish- flesh- fowl-bone leaf-mould dead dogs sodden timber beetle elytra rotten a democratic detritus  Not even palimpsest, just much of a mulchness: as dreg is ON for sedimentary my dear detectorist mire from myrr for bog dirt from drit for shit anagramatised and we know what they ate who did the dumping  Precious little or nowt of Lindum green at the turn into Janus' month, shivering

                 Ingram’s brave garden                 idioyning

                             a 2nd Paradice                spacious & curious

                 the highe walkes   statues   Fish-Ponds pleasant

                             to all sences         & alsoe ye Connys

Distinctions dissolve; jumbled dreck is a lens to focus their dailiness, not incoherent exactly but well shy of grandeur narratives  The archbishop’s palace waits under it all and the Dean’s grass apron withers  Loose your bow-string twang toward the greensward ho ho ho let’s up and go

John Goodby works at Sheffield Hallam University. His poetry has appeared in many journals and in book form with Faber, Arc, Shearsman and Red Ceilings among others. His latest books are a short biography of Dylan Thomas (Reaktion Press, with Chris Wigginton) and the anthology Arcadian Rustbelt (Waterloo Press, with Andrew Duncan) (both 2024). Giral / Dus Redi / Vivus and Aetherstrophen (versionings of Emmy Hennings), both co-written with David Annwn, are to be published by Incanabula and ZimZalla, respectively, in 2025. ‘Robin Hood’s Tower’ is from York Walls Walk Work, a recently-completed circumambulatory opus indebted to David Jones’ ‘The Wall’ and Elisabeth Bletsoe’s Birds of the Sherborne Missal.

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