The legend of course involves great desire,
pursuit, a gift from God, predictable,
final violence.  The stone swirls in ropes

around the straight and narrow ridges, stretched
to the crown: a private space more lavish
for worship than even the house’s best

room, the master mason sure of his skill
until that pause, his hand open in air
without a sign, his cold breath ghosting in

the dust.  His gargoyles and green men grin down
at him, sitting in the gap of absent
inspiration, and when his patron gives

him the pattern of a Continental
design, the Virgin, maybe some saint, dives
to his ear to whisper a pilgrimage

to Rome to see the original work.
So off he goes to do God’s will, as all
good quest tales demand, and leaves a young man

in charge, a simple boy, an innocent,
and as in good myths of the artistic
heart, the apprentice is visited by

a dream voice that murmurs the mystery
of invention and he feels the spirit
guide his tools across the pure, hard surface.

A curled dragon emerges from the earth
and gnaws the roots of the winding vines and
the boughs of a sacred Ash leaf out and

the trunk holds floor and roof in one perfect
syntax of creation.  William St. Clair
is pleased because he owns the whole place, and

the mason returns just then, no longer
master but an ordinary human
servant in awe of obvious divine

intervention.  The account might end here,
in a pretty reversal of fortune,
but the older man, bitten by envy,

heaves a nearby mallet into the head
of the startled apprentice, a “rash and
and cruel” murder.  Both faces still stare from

corners of the polluted, deadly spot,
though a swift “reconciliation” saves
the family’s tainted honor.  But wait, it’s

not over yet—now the tourists, unnerved
by a silly novel but all savvy
enough to know there’s no real comeuppance

kindling for them (age of science, after
all, come on), bow in the graveyard, searching
for clues to Jesus’s descendants.  It’s

a sexy story—Mary Magdalene
running off pregnant, a line of godly
kids.  Maybe they’ll chip a little piece off,

there, or there, a tangible narrative
fragment, an excusable souvenir
of their travels in an empty pocket,

the pillar fading into the setting
as blood once faded into the pavers,
now sealed inside the renovated church.