JOHN TRIPP

A David Jones Mural at Llanthony

      (for Jeremy Hooker)

                       1

Rain had turned the countryside

into a sump. From Capel-y-ffin

that constant, dripping screen obscured the hills,

drowning a file of ramblers

and swallowing two sad pony-treks.

I sheltered under sopping oaks,

then lifted a latch into a long

monk's larder, with boxes of bad apples, oranges,

mouldy biscuits and cake,

a mysterious pyramid of fresh eggs.

On the stone lay a splintered carafe

crusting a sediment of wine at the base.

Then I saw it...

Delighted, I remember thinking:

if the dealers receive wind of this

they'll climb here with mallet and chisel.

It was a signed

original, flaking fast on a cracked wall -

the dark buff and faded red of his fine

leaning script, the numerals of Rome,

a Christian head and a believer's praise embedded in the

                                                                                       text.

Time and neglect were chipping at beauty, scraping a

                                                                        masterpiece.

(He had walked this corridor,

studied the portraits of Tudor martyrs,

put his brushes on the floor beside me,

and gazed at the Black Mountains.

A few days, fifty years before,

occupied his mind and hand

to leave us a lost symbol

like some flourish of hope.

   Feeling, wondering, testing, watching,

   seeing clues in fragments -

   'For it is easy to miss Him at the turn of a civilisation.')

                                      2

Six winters from the Flanders mud

he came here, looking for a slot

of peace, some method to preserve sanity.

Deep reticence after misadventure

informed his plan; the chronicles that unlocked his horror

were yet to be written.

                                    All that complexity,

the full bulging yield of myth

was growing as he painted on a monastery wall -

history to be sacked, language to be made,

the honours far off, and the life

continuing, aimed at the past.

Its price brought the long

loneliness, to be lived through in a Harrow room,

for one soldier of goodness and truth.