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A Landscape Illuminated.

It is the drift between the breath of in and of out,
the fleshy petalled night a poison,
and an endless moonlit rain.

In gardens at very least, the green
will muscle upwards a brief month or two
from cuckoo’s bell and sighing swallows
to the ticking, scratching melodious crickets.

In hills, now, flakes of gold are falling snow silent
and the thin ghosts ever crying for justice
in the long, cold, blue shadows.

We dim with daisies a glimmer haze
And drop of hawthorn goddess,
scented and mean on red-folded air.

Sliding, we are sliding, uncertainly
whether up or down again, the long drip.
Time it is dripping, invented, named, measured
and wasted away as if dawn and sunset were not enough,
and the stars forever clouded and lost in mystery, as they are.

Adrift and turning, rocked gently, dismally declined.
Warmth slow escaping, longing for another somewhere
with bees and lilac and long, painless sleep.
A landscape illuminated, kissed in light,
unburdened with consequence, unfolded.

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Catalogue

rivermouth of the man-servant
house of the councillor
ridge road by the forest’s edge
the abbot’s land.
the dark stream and the winding river
dipped between the domed land
sprinkled with enclosures of saints,
tonsured walls on green tumped hilltops.
the washpool, wolf’s leap, devil’s staircase.

thr whistling ghosts of drovers and the
warm breath panting of their dogs.
stories of cobbled streets and a wild language
far away.

with gold of many kinds,
they return to the long silence here
and the starlit grazing
of sheep at peace.

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NIGHT THE SECOND (A LANDSCAPE POPULATED)

All the clues are there in the symptomatic madnesses. Here they come willingly.
Lurching dressed in the horrors of those Germanic artists driven mad by the scent of the rot of death and the acid blue veins of ergot. Give us this day our daily dead. My very bonnet badge: clan mother belladonna and mad dancing.
The restless limbs rippling,
A hot wind, a sirocco over the waterless sands
Of dried, flaking skin, a glowing leprosy,
A holy transformation back to earth.
Tropanes needle and embolden. The Golden Mean, the Fibonacci, eroded by endless rains so the weighty cliffs of selfhood grow sodden and at last liquify collapsing, stone to mud and root and revealed bones, the sunken bells already deep in salt silt haunted – the unblinking cynic eye of dragons counting the too few millenia of tall brains swaggering top heavy and profligate as if all were truly made for them alone.
Chiselled are the precise gargoyles vomiting rain,
Pissing spouts of life.
The clues are all there, my dears,
They are so close so as to
Raise tiny neck hairs with their breath.
So moist are their lips, my dears,
So darting their electric tongues,
Their opaque eyes staring still,
An inward crouch, a search for vowels
In a sea of consonants.
Only evil comes of elucidation. Eat it all up. Revealed are the shadows in light to be answers.
Clear-cut the butterfly-winged angels come straight from sucking the nectar of God, will drive the penitential into burning buildings and the queues of forbidden passions will be kebabbed and skewered for each chimereal constructed thing. Stare long enough. Turn not away. Given signs and clues and testings. For how many millennia have the lists been corrupted? Turn away upstream or downstream. The same song.
Even angels wither there, becoming demons.
Self-mutilated, gnawing on bones of certainty.
Marking aeons in long, shallow scratches, muttered lists,
Reasons why and why not.
The shelved, locked-out passions, the dirty shameful things. Power piled up, an unused compost that can never rot lest fed, forgiven or owned once more.
It ferments, ignis fatuus, Hand of Glory.
Abhorrence and disgust,
To look elsewhere and forget,
To disinherit, to deny.
Not an easy thing to remain sane and honest. Not a habit that is cultured or condoned. A dangerous device is this difficult conjuration. Likely to consume as consummate. There may or may not be maps, may or may not be instruction. No consensus from a millennium of points of view whispered into the rhythm of the blood.
Be wary of the insistent ones.
The ones offering sense.
White noise as their echoes build up.
White noise becoming stillness.
A perfect inaction,
suspended, turning slow,
turning slow,
cocooned and waiting.

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NIGHT THE FIRST

It is not the placid herds of angels mooing praise nor the conniving pedantic demons.
It is not the male nor the female, nor the roaring furious ones, nor the cowered silent ones.
Nor the eloquent silence, nor the tearing ripping void of sorrows and despair.
Nor the words
Nor the music
Nor the movement
Nor the flash of wings
Nor the sleepy curled furry ones
Nor the bleak uplands, nor the cold winds, nor the emasculating inanities.
Not the glorious truths of dust and measure, nor this, nor that, nor memory, nor forgetfulness.
It is nothing but a book of voices, an intercourse of pulse and pause. A regardless cause, a fleabite itch, primary and secondary, a flowering of galaxies in a tumbled arc across what is not itself. A fierce catastrophic ejaculation, a burst of incalculable seed that looks, feels for, fertile ground uncompromised by purpose or censoring scissors redacting sense and nonsense. A piling out of truths and lies. A justification for beginnings. All the words ever spoke uncysted, growing wings and spines to feel the new red flow, to make a difference, a sifting wind blown unmappable, desert nothing to be quenched but regurgitated photonic haze.
It will inevitably
Fail to favour the blasphemers
With muscle and righteousness,
The gore-caked murderers insistent
Will be cropped and fed quiet bones
Ground down by swans
To cloyed, sweet dust.
There it is, a landscape emerging from mist, a dawn construed half familiar, half achingly strange, inhabited, or not,
Pierced with fierce birdsong
And scything swallows.
A slow mind of colour ripped up,
Pasted from a memory belonging to others,
A grated zest palled, recalibrated as means to an end,
Muscular worm palpating, digesting,
Evacuating.
A little nothing, an almost nothing (see there, a failure to avoid fake evaluations, an arrogance indicative of the species that so presumes an elevated itch: the ability to destroy is the right to destroy). Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil of others. Every time. And slay our enemies who laugh at us with good reason, mocking our belligerent, petty gods, our loathsome, vast and irreducible shadows….

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Looking towards Carn Wen at evening.

To watch the pass
of light and dark
and how they each
shape these hills, this way and that,
is all I wish now to do.
we live, we die
as the distances reveal themselves
then vanish with the pass of a cloud.

if not to fill our time with beauty,
if not to see the world as it becomes us,
then what?
a flicker of pain, a flight upwards of joy
and the rolling of light in the valleys.
what other instruction
for a being of discernment?
what other lesson but this?
and to count the days
’til cuckoos and swallows.
and to keep to the constellations
of sheep and the openness
of lambs.

we shall end again soon enough.
peace is here
and it is sufficient for a whole universe.
and to watch the clouds pile
and drift at the setting sun.
and the smell of dew
on grass.

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View from a mountain garden (part one)

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a house is there,
below the dome of mountain.
in days past
it might have been said
that it nestled ‘neath
the beetling brow
of raven-dark crags.
it is where
the high lands,
the sky lands, stumble and slide
in rough, grey steps
to crouch, dreamy eyed
on dappled sunlight in grassy pasture,
no longer scoured bald with fast airs,
nor woven grey in slow fog.
just here, now, they open slow stone hands,
release the waters, silver and peat-brown,
in streams and bogs and falls.
a tumble of white rush, an ache
of distant noise between
silent rustling oaks, lost in
deep and distance that is measured
and marked by slow drifting sheep,
the pools of sunlight scudding east.

it is a long time staying still, a dwelling,
piled up, re-walled, obscured, uncovered, re-used.
a pronunciation of name, a genealogy of comfort
and shelter, hope and hopelessness, a garden
and a rusting, a perch between here and heaven
and a bell to the beyond beyond that.

these are the colours of a day.
a day before Spring with cold winds
and a sun remembering warmth
and the palest of blue,
fragile blue,
mist-filled, hazy skies……

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A truth that believes

A truth that believes
it is the whole of the truth
Is a poison.

There are ghosts
In the dark, draughty attics
Believe themselves
Kings
Who are owed.

But it is not so.

A point of view
Draped
Over a few seconds
Is not, for sure,
To be relied upon
To define an aeon
Nor a purpose
Nor a good yarn.

All philosophy
Summed up and sundered:
The raven, sharp-eyed
And hungry
From his cliff nest
At break of day.

Expectant
Of
Nothing.

Artefact

ARTEFACT

We come and go one by one,
or in twos and threes,
waking, sleeping from dream to dream,
handfuls of dust cast heavenwards, taking shape,
then falling back to settled earth. Bubbles, thoughts, whispers.

Birdsong in a pearl-still dawn.
All day in this small green field,
in its tangled bare hedges,
in its edge of trees,
in its deep grasses, the birds
flit and feed, pause and fly off.
All day the sunlight picks out the distant slopes,
the forests, the valleys.
And they, too, come and go with mists
and clouds
and drifts of rain.

For months now I have been working the canvases,
(for people do so like a view to hold on to,
one so dear to them, one they do not have,
a way through the mute walls,
to remember an opening out, a beyond,
a distant something).
Against its nature to drip, against its habit to mix and merge,
against my own fingers’ wish to sweep and gesture.
A discipline,
the tying down of an illusion,
confection for tongue and eye.
A sweet minded moment, an ache of forgetting.
The life of itself, a liquid thing,
to be constrained so, to process
as a stately, well-dressed thing.
Not just a swirled, delightful, mute moment.
A meaning. A purpose identified. The monitoring of the familiar.
As if. As if.

As if there were a story.
As if there were a careful, structured tale.
A small beginning, a once, a long-ago.
Through wild, thorned paths and fog and frost
to a final end so careful balanced.
A just so.
An as it is.

Something to leave behind.
Something to say.
More than a rise and fall.
More than a raven’s cry across the valley.
More than a blackbird in the cool dawn air.
More than a drift of mist above a hidden river.
More than a rise of trout as the gnats dance on light.

The fire is lit
and it must be fed ’til nightfall.
Then, untended, it will die down,
become silent.

That smooth black,
silk-dark soot:
a hand-print,
a fingerprint on a cave wall:
we are here,
dreaming.
And we found a way through.

—-

Bird Words

Early morning frost
Wind beneath the raven’s wings
A nice cup of tea.

The first drops of rain
Three kites skim the valley floor
Their cries long and thin.

In the tall oak
by the chapel door
A gang of jackdaws
telling smutty jokes.
They have no care
for the slow sermons
of crows,
Nor the ponderous theology
of glint-eyed
ravens.

March Song

Sunshine on the snowfields.
Rain in the valleys.

The fields are churned,
The lambs cold.

From chimneys
Woodsmoke leans southwards.

But in the hedgerows
Sparrows are chattering.

On every bank
Daffodils risk their yellow song,

And the jackdaws dance
Carefree in wild, grey skies.