John the Baptist Baptizes Jesus at the Odney

Stanley Spencer (British), The Baptism, 1952

John Baptizes Jesus at the Odney Pool

You had not known you belonged to such a region

until Spencer took you there, until he showed you

Cookham, where God made a detour down High Street,

past Fernlea to the Odney Pool,

mineral-laced water near the Thames

where the artist once swam as a child.

All’s inverted now. Heaven’s here--

in the languid pool, where, amid the bathers

in their ordinary, black-knit suits, God’s only Son’s

made known. Here’s John, an odd man in skins,

bristled and untamed, and Jesus, his face

that of any villager. No one seems surprised

as this little miracle unfurls. The scene is crowded,

narrow space filled with the press of bathers

on this afternoon of gossip, summer voices

left over from childhood’s drowsing.

Some of the villagers are napping, stretched out

in quiet leisure on the bleached stone steps.

Others gaze calmly as John pours water

from a copper bowl over the head of God’s

beloved boy. Why should they stand amazed?

It is you who are changed in this anointing,

seeing the world through the painter’s eyes,

its cold waters turned tender and familiar

in the fading light, this low cast that alters all.

Remote things join in me, Spencer wrote.

Life quickens here--

Of course, they’ll all depart too soon,

making their way back toward tidy houses,

predictable patterns, now rearranged--

but look, before you leave,

at the broad water-meadows that flood each spring,

where colour’s splashed

on this dully-lit summer day,

where you seek some last pleasure

in the pale English sun. And there--

you can just see those three lone trees

he painted, trees his young daughters loved

for the way they seem to march past

the horizon to some other world--

and always back to Cookham, its quiet lanes

where  none of us is missing now. 

Margaret Mackinnon

This poem first appeared in The Los Angeles Review.​ Margaret Mackinnon’s work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, and The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. Her first book, The Invented Child, received the 2011 Gerald Cable Book Award and the 2014 Literary Award in Poetry from the Library of Virginia. Naming the Natural World, a chapbook, was published by The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review in 2018. She lives in Richmond, VA.