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“I was with Euron and Eurwys..”

In the resounding halls, in the forest deep,

By the shattering hearth, bright-eyed, exhilarated

I was with Euron and Eurwys, changing skins, making roads.

Casting seeds, nesting, fruiting,

Gathering blossoms for the feasting.

In the garden dripping with rain,

Cool-browed at the spine-tree,

Watchng stars dance and divide.

In the scented earth, neck deep,

Learning from worms the peaceful transformation.

At the end of the day and at the dawn.

Dumb, speechless as rivers, knowing all things.

At the grinding end of continents,

The whispering whimper of worlds.

At the evocation of gases, at the mudra of fire.

Weaving the plaid the poets know,

The language that ends suffering.

On the mountain top with clouds of mistrust,

With the prisons of the Law.

Moving through the doors of stone,

Frost-cracked, marked with cold tongues.

Moving through the doors of song,

Weightless as whales that dream of deeper things.

Cascading, fountaining in the fort revolving,

Perfectly formed, chased and limned

With ancestral universes.

With the primal poets, the prime progenitors,

Careless and frugal, weighing out worth,

The hierarchies of sound, tricksters of vision.

With the echoing bells, the endless carillons,

With the deep trumpets and the drums of bone.

Slow and pointed the needle words sew,

The rents repaired, the new gods fashioned.

There in the mountain storm, in the torrent,

In the slide of earth and the shattering of walls.

In the dark at midday, in the throne,

On the cross, forgiven and forgiving,

The sword of light in the shining hand.

There with Aristotle and Alexander,

With Ptolemy and Zeus,

Dappled Aphrodite, deadly Diana,

And the bear-wrapped wanderers.

The naked, jet-black girls.

With the figures of light

That flicker behind the veils.

With the dancing dragons,

The drunken souls of dreaming.

With the panoply of meaning.

With the caparisons of delight,

With the mysteries of silence.

Mute before catastrophe,

Gathering souls and names,

Sailing away west into night,

East into dawn birdsong.

The bow of the moon,

Giving us new birth.

It’s a while since I posted here – I find the working of this site increasingly tedious and opaque, when it was once so straightforward. That’s progress for you. I will be putting up more of last year’s words to sort of catch up on myself , at least partially. See there is an autocorrect butting in now, great!

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TALIESIN IN EDINBURGH

7

And shall I now sing the same sing

In the voice of sweet, sad Sorley?

Mugged on the streets by the muddle-headed,

The roar of impatient buses even in the cobbled ways

Hidden from any sunny truth.

The roar of modernity beating the brains

From the fallen doves of loveliness.

And the peace in the glens (where we lay

And forget even our names for a while),

And the peace of the hills (where we wept

With the rainbow promises of unlikely futures).

I shall walk with the ghosts down to the Grassmarket.

I shall nose into the deep pockets of Death

And await a sign, like Greyfriar’s Bobby,

And love it all, and lose it all – all the loud wanting,

All the measureless cloth and cut of status –

In the dusty bookshops down New Town way.

The hidden waters, unsuspected, below the gardens,

Below the pavements. The rock of ages

Staring down as it ever was: an emperor,

Purple in the dawn, where the pigeons quiver and coo.

It was mine. It was all mine, without taking one step.

Lungs filled with with barley malt from the breweries

There by Usher Hall. Seeping into every hope

On frosty mornings, the warm rusk scent of it,

Crossing the Meadows beneath whalebone arch

And cherry aisle. Old straight tracks

Converging on soot-black steeples.

Our slender grasp on life reaching for thistles

(And the harsh wind, a plaid of discomfort

Walking us into winter along the long grey cliffs

Of tenement and aspiring views).

Across the hills to the hills beyond,

And beyond that to the long dead hills

Dreaming in the Kingdoms of Fife

And the shining Forths.

Diesel chokes the throat at dawn chorus.

The sun, too neon, misses us out

And rises nonchalant.

The myth is always there, dressed in rags,

And us, looking down, scanning the pavements

For the wrong kind of gold.

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“I was a speckled white cockerel

Covering the hens in Eidyn”.

1

The egg is the sun,

Laid from the dark feathers of night,

Nested in the dawn of the world.

I am the grain of truth

Radiant in the drunkard’s boasts,

Naked in the silent waiting.

I learnt all languages from the waves,

All harmony from the tides.

Neither bird nor beast,

A tree in the forest am I,

A thousand eloquent tongues of green fire.

At dawn the cockerel calls my name.

Clear Song. Hall of Light. Mound of Obedience.

2

A domestic mythology.

A farmyard mythology.

No wolves, no hungry obstructors

Racing across space devouring sun and moon.

A black hen pecking the dust for grain.

In the corner of the eye

Time nailed fast to a new course.

3

Ah! The seed of poets

Spilling into the dark crevices

Of a fertile earth.

More precious than gold,

The desire for it,

More precious than song,

The moans in the hour of midnight.

I would strut and sing,

Hold all in dizzy thrall.

The girls would love it:

The boldness of it, the sly word,

The sliding, echoing eloquence.

Drunk would they be – the men snoring

Dreaming of a good death;

The girls tap, tapping on my door,

Filled with wonder till dawn’s light.

The seed of poets is an endless forest,

A skilful net of shining catch.

4

In Eidin I had dominion of the hill,

Dominion of the Mound, dominion of the castle.

A steady fortress was my staff,

Planted and reaching to heaven.

The gulls of Leith, the ravens of the Crags:

None was more raucous than I,

None more forthright in the bright morning,

None more persuasive in torchlight flicker.

They would rise softly ( like the Lammermuirs).

They would dip and sigh and open (like the Pentland Hills

Under a summer sky).

And I, the open tomb, echoing,

Doorway to golden moments freed from earth,

Free from guilt and sin.

A golden morning in the scattered dust,

Seeds uncovered, beginnings shining, a new sun,

New worlds nested, round and warm,

A clutch of futures, a prophecy of birth.

5

In a line or two

The bonny hero

Shall have his come-uppance.

Try as he might, the slippery eel,

The voracious worm, the flying hawk,

Shall be brought to justice, consumed, dead,

Himself eaten whole, adversaries conjoined,

The dark mother victorious.

6

Above Marchmont, above Morningside,

Above The Meadows, my covering wings,

My tremulous touch, sunlight penetrating

The deep hidden waters.

On The Mound, on Castle rock, on the Crags,

I brighten and burst forth.

On Arthur’s Seat I am resplendent.

I take my pleasures on the pleasant fields of Portabello;

I dive in the secret quiet waters of St. Margaret’s Loch.

The fortress is mine.

A crimson tram the long length of Prince’s Street.

A swoop down to genteel Inverleith.

My thirst goes forth beyond the shining rivers,

The blue hills dreaming in Fife

And the leaping span of poetry

To cross over it all to mystery.

My name is Taliesin.

I am the cocaine of bards.

Nine breaths of my cauldron,

And you are mine.

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Here.

There we are then.

Rainy morning.

The demons are sleeping.

Still summer

But there is a white quietness

In the air.

A sigh of traffic.

Floating on choices

The world drifts

For a moment

Deciding that hills and fields

Are best.

And a certain viridian

That belongs nowhere better.

Low cloud

Disguises everything else.

A small world glowing green.

.

Here we are then.

A few miles south from Beulah,

The seed of poetry

In every word.

Counting sheep and blessings,

Seeing the changes slow

And the changes fast.

The voices of the dead

Slowly accumulating

On the hillsides.

The fords full

And sullied

Spinning brown waters.

Reflection only

In still moments.

.

Here we are then.

Sun breaking through,

Bees at the honeysuckle,

Meadowsweet enough

To be making maidens

For the dispossessed.

Myth is the engine

Chugging in the cellar,

Fumes for the future,

Fuelled by dream

and prophecy.

Left here as time races on.

Piecing together clues,

Inviting menus,

Acrostic logic,

Randomly correct.

A divination, a distraction

From small glory.

.

Here we are then.

The footsteps of the dead

In every heartbeat,

Their sighs in every breath.

On the stairs

Their voices whisper,

In the halls

Their ghosts breeze by.

Belonging starts in the heart

And grows out from there.

Moses has not returned

From his mountain

And we have been left

To our own devices

Playing on coaltips,

Dabbling in poisoned streams,

Laughing at small jokes

And other’s discomforts.

Children still,

Beneath it all.

Watching the clock

We have never really

Learnt to read.

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.

Pirate jay swings high through his dark wood,

Eye on falling gold.

.

Day gives out early now, evening inks the cooling world.

The sun is warm, but shadows cool the slowing sap.

.

What have we omitted in the long summer days?

What remains undone? What forgotten?

.

Late roses fall, beans fatten.

Soon the frosts come, green pushing faint and failing.

.

Gather in now, and wait for winter.

Inevitable increments, time winds it all up.

.

Pirate jay, his eye accomplished,

Swings round the rolling decks of weather.

.

The hills crowd darker dressed in cloud,

The woods velvet coal, a dreaming nest.

.

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.

This land, boy, is called history.

And she sleeps naked to the sky

And dreams of heroes.

.

This land wades through its weather,

Wrapped in stories, warmed by its belonging.

We are gnats here for an hour or two

Dancing above an eternal pool

Reflecting the sapphire deep skies.

.

This land stretches from shore to shore,

From sea to seabed, one continuous cloak,

A net of heart fires.

.

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IN THE TEETH OF WINTER.

.

The sun, it is hanging in the holly.

It is tangled in the oak tree.

It feeds what creatures it might.

.

The year, made of fruits, made of blossoms,

Is yet a cauldron of melting snow,

Barely born, barely breathing.

.

Kindled and crackling, the day spits shadows.

We are all storytellers when we can do little else.

Telling of deceit and guile,

And how the great sun could be brought so low,

Our saviour bound, hostaged.

.

A song to return our hopes.

A song to fend off darkness.

A song to teach the children

That all is not lost.

Though we fear it is.

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CUP AND RING

This wind from the fist of the storm,

This roaring in the pines,

These tumbling waters

From the fist of the mountains.

Time is the ache that sifts between fingers

And knots the locks of thought.

Bright swords are dulled with using;

Words ignored, unheard once more.

Those who chiselled the flat cold rocks knew this.

They have their voices still, and their long shadows

At the short days, return the sun, return the small hope

That lasting will be better than leaving.

Though leaving will bring rest and song.

That life will sift and slip through the fist

Of indomitable emptiness,

Whisper in patterns, find names and breath.

Circles ripple on stone.

Time is not a crop to give its yield.

The gold is elsewhere, glistening.

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BY CHANCE

.

By chance I picked out Dylan.

Not his swinging easy, not his remembered known.

It was his mysterious, dipped in Taliesin,

Dipped in the sublime.

Next to nonsense with the druids.

Next to lullaby and curse,

Next to madness (as all true wisdom is).

Line on line, piled up volcanically,

Overstepping the mark,

Singeing the happy world,

Burning the lazy words and setting the others free –

The other words of fire and gold,

The words barely human that insinuate

Ungodly pictures of worlds here but covered.

True but shattered words, sharp as glass.

Words reflecting bone and salt and jet and thunder.

Mad Dylan, burning his fuses day and night.

Eating passion, smoking passion, drinking passion.

Fingertips brushing hot, soft passion and laughing

Like a babe, drunk on sound and made mad

By cobweb sobrieties, made mad by ancestors,

Mad by earlier gods who required always the best sacrifices:

The first sons, the first lamb, the first daughter, the first grain.

See him fall burning, head downwards, like Blake in the night.

See him wish petticoats to lift and seed to be cast.

See him turn to serpent, turn to tree, turn to the gate unlocked,

And run into the world, naked, naked, naked, clothed in dreaming.

Released from the ocean’s fist, a sunlight shout, dazzling

.

Dylan Thomas is one of my favorite poets. However, I do weary of the overexposure given to his (few) easier pieces, Fern Hill, Do not go gentle, Under Milk Wood and so on. The majority of his works are catastrophes of piled imagery singing so deep as to bamboozle everyone not simply happy to delight in ecstatic sound and image. His chaos, too, is usually so skilfully structured that he can hide rhyme structures seamlessly into them. On this occassion, I opened his collected works at random, and was as usual blown away by the heavy gold-threaded brocade of his lines.

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BEFORE RAIN

.

The silent moments before rain

Where distance becomes hollow

And light, silent, holds its breath.

Then the whispering of the cloud,

The shivering of leaves away, away.

A new coolness then, and the rush of life

That sighs and lets go.

.

The atmosphere is a domed stupa.

The remains of the buddhas are everywhere.

Their teachings are rivers and seas.

Their teachings are the green mountains

And the roaring valleys.

A mind terma,

a mountain terma.

A dakini dance between raindrops.

.

What was lost is found,

woven into petrichor.

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