"My hand on chiseled stone": A touch across the centuries in Denise Levertov's "The Past (II)"

In her poem "Inheritance", which I wrote about the other day, a family story takes Denise Levertov back over a century to her grandmother's childhood. In "The Past (II)", which is also in "A Door in the Hive" (1989), Levertov touches a stone church and imagines the masons who built it: "My hand on chiseled stone, fitting / into the invisible / print of the mason's own [...]." Taking her even farther than that story, that touch guides Levertov across the centuries to imagine a scene from the age of the church's construction: "The new dust / floated past, his mate / from the scaffolding reached down / for the water-jug." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 January 2023)

 

The Past (II)

Denise Levertov, A Door in the Hive, 1989

Collected Poems, 842-843

 

'The witnesses are old things, undimmed, dense

With the life of human hands' – Czesław Miłosz

 

My hand on chiseled stone, fitting

into the invisible

print of the mason's own

where it lay

a moment of that year the nave

was still half-risen, roofless . . .

 

There's a past that won't suffice:

years in billions,

walls of strata. My need roams

history, centuries not aeons.

And replica is useless.

 

The new dust

floated past, his mate

from the scaffolding reached down

for the water-jug.

 

This stone

or another: no inch of all

untouched. Cold, yes,

 

but that human trace

will burn my palm.

This is a hunger.