To Our Once and Precious Watch

After succesfully finding the Kafka / Orwell-esque 'Department of Work and Pensions', I headed back from Portslade into Brighton again. Except I didn't quite make it. I walked back along the Old Shoreham Road, an unreal summers day; sunlight shafts on car-metal and tarmac, and this far from the sea, even the seagulls were silent.
I slipped off of the Old Shoreham Road and into Hove Cemetery, a place I discovered a few weeks ago when returning from the job centre.
Something restful about churchyards, I don't know why. I think, all those farewells, they should leave a trace of melancholy behind. Rarely so. Instead there is a kind of serene and timeless peace about such places.
Hove Cemetery is far larger than I had thought. Closely packed gravestones crowd winding paths. A small church rises up in the centre of this quiet geography, church spire like some aerial picking up quiet transmissions. Silent transitions. Slipping from waking into sleep.
I flickered over memorials, misreading some here and there; 'to our once and precious watch'. I didn't look back to read what the inscription really was.
I wondered what their precious vigil was meant to watch out for.
Who removes the heads of angels in churchyards? Strange and briefly glanced upon mysteries. An angel actually with a head resting sanguine on a tomb. William Morris? Is that you? -No of course not... Pre-Raphaelite doppelgangers. Shadow painters and same-named men lost in the same sleep.
The tall closely packed tombs set up a kind of doppler effect. An optical illusion. Out of the corner of my eyes it felt like someone walked with me. Churchyard rhythm, graveyard canter. A dog between the stones, a cemetery crow, and the wind through the leaves like the crashing of waves against a shoreline bordering sleep.
I came to the quietest corner of the graveyard, sat on the grass beside an unsafe bench. Watched conifer trees drop cones in the breeze, a scattering of them like snowflake-coins, precise and mathematical design. Reminded me of Scotland. I took out my sketchbook and drew without thinking; a woman holding the image of a figure, perhaps herself, the head of this effigy, or ghost, thrown back in ecstasy. A wild euphoria, like the man and woman kissing behind her, slipping into a background of trees, a hill of wild grass and rumoured rivers.
It was so beautiful in the churchyard, so peaceful, and that peace laced through with a current of something mysterious and unnameable. No time and all time. Yesterdays not mine, memories of things never experienced. A kind of deja-vu, but I've been here before.
Music on my headphones; the Swans, Kate Bush, Fields of the Nephilim. I stayed for hours, thought of Emily and this summer, and finally, as the clock ticked up toward evening, I headed home.
Except I didn't quite make it. St Anns Well Gardens... so I stayed there for a while, in the long drawn out evening sun, watching the pale leaves of poplar trees in the breeze, watched dogs rush victorious through bushes, and wondered what it would be like to be a squirrel with the freedom of all the branches to be lost in.
I finally headed home, got back about half an hour ago.
I think of the churchyard peaceably drifting into night, that place where the street lights grow dim, and even clocks grow lazy.