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Posts Tagged ‘art’

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In the mist at daybeak:
Ghost of whitened
mountain
Climbs thunderclouds.

Under eaves,
through slow rain spatter,
Small bats chase,
wings squeeking.

Still is the air.
We tumble
and totter
through space.

We are now such
A tower of cloud
And rain.

A roar,
A drumroll,
A whisper,
Percussed silence.

Leaving glistening
Green skin:
This world.

As she sleeps
I find her slopes
And gullies.
I love the
Familiar folds.
A rising mountain
I become
And she,
The deep greens
And valley dark.
No distinction:
One rising breath,
One landscape.
We, a loved land
Clouded and clear.

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1
River full and woodsmoke

Days now, dark and fast as water
Flickering as night thunder

The houses and we shall huddle
Against the black slant of rain
Against the towering, swooping clouds.

Settling in the drift of slow, golden leaves
The bitter bite of brightest bramble
Aspen leaves, their last long laughter.

In the silver firs, on the church tower,
Jackdaws chafe and circle chatter
Wind skirls dancing, wet skirts slapping.

2
These mountains, worn low
Settled down, but content,
(As humans could never be),
Folded arms, their valley breasts.
A sharp-eyed, smiling mam,
Neat pinny fields, indulged with sheep.

3
I ride again the poetry road along a ridge of weather.
Words hovering, red and lithe as kite tail feathers
Tasting wet, west winds.
Hope and ambition, a stiff field thistle
Lasting out the slow rot to winter.
Wood will bend, sedge stand stiff,
A hard chew, a gristle is this cold tune.
Worn thin, the leaves rattle, a clatter of bones.
Death’s feet dancing to keep himself
Warm for hedgerow work.
Ghost cries of fox down in the valley wood
Disturbing warm-sided farm dogs, a howling choir.
Night and day, a scatter of starlight,
A tumble of rain.

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BRECON CATHEDRAL YEW WOOD

Dappled, the dead sleep
A slow, chimed crumbling.
A choir, a roof, are these yews.
Riven and sundered, tied back and bound,
Reworked, ribbed, buttressed.
They stand between the leaning,
Between the soaring: the lime,
The cedar, archangel sequoia –
All elders singing before the throne.
A hymn of jackdaw and blackbirds,
An antiphon of ivy dust.
Time riding heavenwards by degree,
Folded and sealed,
A shrouded, deeper silence.

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VOICE AND NAME
(Says the yew of Llandovery)

A song uninterpretable.
Vast as mind.
As black and white,
As dark,
As ocean elided.
None of the small, bright words,
Clear and ambiguously bright.
No fluttered pennants, simple and gay.
No battle standards, maces of cerebral dogma.
No knife-edged brilliant certainty.

It is a howling void of the real,
Resolving in beauty only on fullest surrender.
What is your name?
It would take an eternity to say it,
And then nothing would be unknown,
Nothing left out.

Dark time, invisible to counting.
Inconsequential moment
By-passed, mistaken, overlooked.
A beggar’s bowl by the roadside,
Never full, never empty.

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YEW AT LLANYMDDYFRI

I am a fire banked up.
No loud voice
No chanted, righteous psalms,
No holy threats.
Quietly I suck the dead,
Draw from what they no longer need.
Green leaves and slow, dark sap.
A skein of green dressed in veils of ivy.

Not large, not small,
I go on regarding, regardless.
My hymns are quiet,
A gravity for time and space
To dance around.

Disregard me.
I am as undistinguished
As you shall be
As you fall forgotten
Mixed with mud and misty memories.
But I shall see days you shall never know.

A stone’s throw from eternity’s grey walls.
Lived in by wrens, lived in by blackbirds,
Priest and brown sexton.
Banked up against the long hill,
The green valley cowled and shaded,
A cave for meditations.

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And now, at last, these geometries fade and waver,
Shimmer and dissolve. They pale into dream by the minute,
Their patterns particular, their patterns platonic, eidetic,
Now smudge and stumble, arching poetry drowned
As crystalline mechanics impose precisions of direction.
Here revolve the greater means, the spheres of motion.
More primal their causes, more abstract and faceless
In their godwards ascending.

Spera nona – spera motus octave spera que fit motus eius de septentrione ad meridiem et e converso ( ninth sphere, which moves the eighth sphere and causes it to travel from north to south and vice versa)

We spin and drift
Caught in a mighty flow of will,
Ninth and tenth now are these spheres,
Mighty, faceless,
A slow measuring out
Of purpose,
A swing of footsteps,
A steady scythe, left to right.
A fall of stars,
A winnowing light.

Spera decima – spera suprema qua fit motus de occidente ad orientem et est pricipium motus (tenth sphere – highest sphere in which takes place the movement from west to east and which is the principal of all movement).

Fold up and slew the horizons.
The palaces of motion,
Hollow vowels, time evolving
Revolving through centuries
Turning one way, turning another,
A dance, stately and preposterous.

Natura pricipium corporis (Nature as the principal of bodies)

The four spheres of the soul:
Anima vegetabilis
Anima animalis
Anima rationabilis
Anima celestis

Discontiguous,
Folded between the transcendent, fierce certainty
Of angels, and sullen dust,
(The grinding orbs of time and space),
Float four soul worlds,
Unhinged, awaiting injection,
Awaiting ejection:
A breathed upon word to vivify
And consecrate voiceless earth.

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CONVERSATIONS 15

REWRITE
Convincing ghosts rewrite our certain pasts,
or bitter to the last, at least try to inject their dying voices,
inject their reasons, their stories.
We all, full of hunger, scurry for validation,
deny our small wickednesses, rewrite, remember.

SHADED
In that
Green shade
We are made
And unmade.
Click of insect moments.


COUPLET
The demons of eloquence
are not always right,
but their arguments
should always ruffle and delight!


HARMONIC
What each we are,
A note plucked once and dying.
Attack, sustain, release, delay.
That harmonic wave is what we are,
How we intrude,
How we linger.


SMALL
Over that hill it is always dawn, always midnight.
The smell of dew on hay,
The rising insects floating silent.
All this is uniquely ours –
This dawn, this sunset,
A moment fashioned and nested.
An egg of memory, in this small circle.


SUNLIT
The pillars of the sky:
Skylark’s song.
Morning stillness.


NOT QUITE
In you…
Nothing moves
That is not world’s spin,
Past’s voice.
A wind’s will,
A wisp,
Not quite a nothing
Not quite a quite…


EDGE
One star remaining
White edge of the summer night
Rimmed, restless, drawn out.


BINARY
Alert
Or asleep, on
or off,
The eye
Of the I,
Blink, unblink,
Blink.

—-
VALEDICTION
The vale of now.
We move in and out of it
Hardly touching,
So caught up we are:
The sounds of our own echoing,
Fading footprints.
Mouthing alphabets
And times-tables.
Numerate, literate,
Dust dressed in story,
Veiled whisp, regardless.

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ROOSTED

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Between the light stream and the dark stream,
Upon the ridge road blessed in sun, washed by rain,
We have settled now near the gentle dead,
(Slate heads ivy-wrapped, whispering praises
In the old, long language, name and age and date).

Crumbled, crumbling, the dried yarrow, ground ivy,
Under the green candled boughs of the arbor vita,
Under the arc of apple and yew and hazel.
Wings folded, feathers shaken, we roost.

Reacquianted with the arc of silence,
With the certain thickness of stone walls,
With the roaring call down tall chimneys,
The voices choired, remembered, grass green.

Under the oakwoods and under the ash,
Along honeysuckle and rose-cooled evenings,
Into moon-swept, singing midnight.

Swept up, returned by chance.
Become hills, become vales,
Become the smooth, rolling road.

—-

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A new project based on Images from Exeter Cathedral. Ambient interiors.

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Spera octava – spera stellata

The circle of stars, a silvered scum, a foam, a detritus,
A flotsam of teleologies, nub-ends of endless parties,
A whispered recital from dust-gnawed cities.
Shall we savour their strangeness, the fruit of centuries?
A wish
The tomb
The roof
The old man.

The tent
Al Tard, the end.
The apes
The south gate
A pillar
The old folks.

The raven’s neck
The falling cross
The long sandbank
The wolf.

Al Kaid, the eggshells
The embracer
The green hill
The changer.

Kakkab Mulu-izi, the star-man of fire.
The magician
The golden well
The spectre’s head
The first frog.

Al baluh, the city.
The azure dragon
Crown of the forehead
The southern sea
Announcer of invasion on the border.

Narrow cloudy train of female stars
Golden cluck hen and her five sisters.

Temennu, the foundation stone
Al wasat, the central one
Saptar shayar, the seven anchorites
The white of the poplar tree.

San Tsze, three instructors
Antasurra, the upper sphere
Drag-blod, the fire tail.
Pivot of the planets
The nail
The bright one
Ishtar
Bethulah
The defenceless
The virgin’s girdle
The lady of heaven
Taygeta
Atrami
Segin
Aludra.

And so we fly past the whispering lights,
souls and stories,
wished-for and longings,
The indicators of time and movement,
a slightest of lost taste,
A melting of bright ice.
Silence returns.

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