Seeing with Grave Eyes, 1842
The extraordinary St. Mary’s Church in Wreay, England,
completed in 1842, replaced an earlier dilapidated chapel.
I woke from the dead
to find myself in the parish church.
No longer was I a sleeper
in a soft mound under the yew,
grass rooting down.
I was awake and seeing, seeing
light streaming through coloured glass,
and a procession of polished angels
and flying wooden birds everywhere—
and me seeing with new eyes.
But this was not the church I knew
before I fell deep into the well
& drank the death water.
Those dull windows were set in crumbling stone,
some shuttered tight like a dead man’s eyes.
When it’d come a storm, the wind
would blow the slates off like hail
& pigeons roosted in the rotten rafters.
I’d seen mice scurry up the aisle
for bits of holy bun, but I never followed.
And here I was sitting, transported,
after spending I don’t know how long
in the deepest dark I never could imagine
till this streaming light overtook me,
and I came out of gestation.
And, before me, a bird bigger than a rooster—
with wings spread like flapping sheets,
its neck stretching up like a hay fork,
a bird like I’d never seen
among the little robins and wrens.
But it wasn’t the bird
that made me feel like morning.
T’was the colored light all around it
creating a shadow of itself
as fine as any double rainbow.
And all those spread wings—
of angels, bats, and cockerels,
lifting the loss that had found me,
loss as deep as the old well rumbling
with cold water from the fells.
Up, up, the wings flew
and took my burdens away
like the shadows they were,
which all seemed real enough—
but all was fading, fading …
Where was the light? Where was I?
Then an arrow pierced me truly,
pierced me with this unwanted wisdom:
I was to take myself back to the grave,
waiting, till all my seeing itself became the light.
Hartley & Nothingness
Hartley Coleridge was
the diminutive son
of the famous poet,
deemed guileless as the dewdrop,
destined to have a lamb’s heart
amid the roisterous herd,
who took early to drink and spent
many nights cold in barns & ditches,
who called himself “poor elf,”
wrote impeccable sonnets
& wore all his life
a short blue jacket
over his narrow chest.
No wonder people thought him odd.
For himself he wondered
“all the day & all the evening
what it would be,
if there were Nothing,
if all the men & women,
and birds & beasts,
& the sky, & the Ground
were all gone. Darkness & coldness—
& nothing to be dark & cold.”
He was only four or five
when he wondered that
I, past the 52 years he had to live,
ponder the same,
knowing there is Nothing to be added.
Nothing taken away.
That is why I always cry
when Hartley, found by the roadside,
and tucked in bed, neighbors standing vigil,
rasps his request to hold again my baby
in his dying arms
Kathryn Kimball grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, has an MFA and PhD, and taught writing and nineteenth-century British and American literature. Her translations and poems have appeared in Acumen, Atlanta Review, Blue Mountain Review, Blue Unicorn, Dewdrop, Plume, Galway Review, Haikuniverse, Solstice, Tipton Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She published a chapbook in 2021 and a volume of poetry in 2025 and won the Columbia Journal 2023 translation prize. She lives in New York City.
