… this any place where God lets down the ladder
John Ruskin
‘Don’t let go yet. What was it made you cry
Just then? Keep holding on to me. You cried
Like a new baby launched upon the world,
A singer at her pitch of ecstasy,
A trapped animal howling against pain.’
I cried?
‘As if from a shut room inside.
Not like your own: like someone else’s cry
Sounding within you.’
If it was me that cried,
Or if through me the two of us, it was
That as we grappled here we seemed to touch
Some nerve of inwardness. Let me turn preacher.
I have, in former discourse, been inclined
To speak of love as though it were a thing
Outward and visible: the which thing is
In truth a fallacy. Consider Jacob,
Who wrestled with an angel and prevailed.
Where was that angel? Or those other ones
He witnessed in a nameless desert place
Somewhere between Beersheba and Haran?
The scriptures use the figure of a ladder
Propped between land and sky to body forth
The dream he had, head pillowed on a stone,
Of angel hosts ascending and descending.
But now, from the new exegetes, we learn
Of a stark outcrop glacially planed,
A table-land, with terracing for stairs;
Or – since it was, he said, the House of God –
Of a stepped temple, a symbolic mount
Like a vast altar, from whose surface priests,
With cries to distant gods, offered up smoke,
Throwing it forth, as charred bones fell away,
A frail and ghostly bridge from earth to heaven.
‘We have travelled a long way
From the dark chamber of your inwardness.
What could have caused that resonance today?’
I don’t know. It was nothing. I can’t say.