The Ornamental Hermit
Not really ornamental, a white figure
you might glimpse from the drive, deep in the beech woods,
as you were making your way towards the house,
standing so still he might have been a long strip
of sunlight on the bark, except that you felt,
not his eyes on you exactly, but his thoughts.
Hardly anyone saw him close up. The cook,
who had, said he was wearing a floppy robe
of coarse stuff and looked like a man in a bag,
and a visitor who had come face to face
with what appeared to be a nightgowned person
supposed he was mad or walking in his sleep.
No one could agree on his age. The footman
who left last night’s jellied fowl and potatoes
beside his sandbank grotto in the morning
would say, after a long pause, he thought the chap
wore spectacles but he stayed in the shadows
hunched over his Bible. They were not to speak.
He was a lover who had renounced the world
or else he had been promised a thousand pounds
if he could live for seven years in the cave
that had been scooped out for him, rising at dawn,
then brooding the whole day over the hourglass,
at night praying or reading by candlelight.
Hermits were all the rage these days but this one
could not have been laid on as an ornament
for houseparties. Some of the guests went so far
as to doubt his existence, or at least claimed
that he had long ago climbed the wall, leaving
his implements in the slowly filling hole.
But it was like this. There are times when a man
must grasp where he is living. It’s not enough
any more to lie under your roof at night
hearing the dry rain, to own all those acres
of dark and dirt, without someone to feel it,
to be in the thick. That’s what I paid him for.
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