A piece written after reading some excellent though extremely labyrinthine poetry by David Jones, which merged with memories of a bookshop at Aberystwyth, and a very hot summer at the end of the world.
The bookshop by the sea,
a roaring word feather,
groomed perfect perfumed owls,
horizon eyes half closed, half dreaming.
Butter would not melt
though a burning sun darkens the door.
Swell and sweat in season’s love,
we shall not see its like nor its disrobed disgust,
nor its glory, once we are dust between pages
tied to ink hard-pressed, etched in acidic misery.
The stinging tongue, salt-wiped, wrapped in salve:
praise the saliva saving insolence and swell tides lost
but leaping, fornicated, fenestrated, facilitated,
heaped wave on wave that the land shudders
and shall not stand, but millennia by millennia,
in minuscule and majuscule, each season lose an inch,
a scarred edge falling to mud- bright mind-stuff,
the dust of eloquence snorted by hogs.
Our lightning bright fire tree blazing, but all consumed,
sentenced by relentless awen-tide that so rides and roars,
roundless, relenting nothing, to save nothing, nor to stoop
nor to stop it all, but bare, to eat to the bones
all this roving, revolving wonder.
And the seasons flick their greasy fingers,
sated but still reaching for more.
An addict for glory, a crucifixion stretched on four pillars,
The world woman opened for birth
and for more, for more.
A gentle Spring in the hills, death under the greening hedge and byre.
A gentle Summer, despite the fierce toothed light
a fading, fading fight for breath.
A gentle Autumn: tears on the valley mists
and the webs of warfare stretched between limbs
of the dying light.
A gentle Winter, at last a silence wordless,
millstone grating mountain and sickles blunt, stars exploding,
cessation the heart centre maelstrom,
gravity roaring it all down to itself.
The chambers of the soul undressed.
Time stretched too far to return to its shape.
Hope collapsed, changing, clanging, clinging,
the mother births and births again.
Eternal flower, feed us, feed us.
Take us not from the pap of love, the hill of glory,
the fortress of light.
We have watched the seasons come and go
and still have yet to learn anything.
Save us from the men who plan.
