Visiting Tintern


I'm first to visit the abbey this morning.
The floor is thick wet grass and the ceiling
a mist that hangs low in the valley, shrouding
the village in its horseshoe loop
along the river, swollen and close today.
Shopkeepers stack sandbags in threes
along the bank, up early to work.
This ancient skeleton seems rejected,
purposeless on Sunday morning.

But the ruins are full of unexpected spaces,
gaps of light, patches of wildflowers,
and a serenity holier than a church's.
I'm surprised that Wordsworth didn't mention
the abbey in his poem: there's a quiet here
he would have liked, the silence through which
nature reclaims its temples, rocks once made
into walls, but now time-smoothed rocks again.
Doves nest in the stony rafters of the nave.
The abbey rests like a post-Christian monument
to the beauty of this place, or to the poet's words
which have ambled out of the woods above it.

Yesterday I hiked up to Devil's Pulpit before sunset.
Looking down at the valley, I could see the entire
bend of the Wye where Tintern is nestled.
A man with his dogs stopped there with me
and we stood for a long time not talking
between the sudden disturbances of his dogs
as they raced around us, just off the trail.
On the way down I grabbed a walking stick.
The path was steep and root-ridden
and all the way to the bottom I listened
to my feet, their iambic intuition,
that pleasant metered sound rising up  
through the crunching leaves
as they found their way steadily around
tree trunks and rocks, unhurried but
directed, meandering back toward town.
                                       


Nina Riggs