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Posts Tagged ‘landscape photography’

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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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Raven Wind

Eight from the cliffs,
In groups of two and three,
Flowing into the light,
Into mist and mazy weather
Buoyed on distant sight
Sharp as ice,
Bright as water,
Wing-tips singing,
A smudge
Of unbegrudged blessing.

—

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RED HILL

that open hill crowned with light.
this dark valley lost in winter.
patient oak and purple birch,
and the fast, grey river.

folded and hidden is the road to Troed Rhiw,
between the cliffs of day and the cliffs of night.

a cold wind and a cast of rain on the red hill.
at the rivers’ meeting are round silent pools,
the small sands, the worn, smoothed chambers, in the lee of the flood.

a roar, white as cloud, stretches the skin of green rock,
squeezed between the knees of Craig Clungwyn and Rhuddallt.
a mouth of water it is, a long name, a summons,
a history of welcomings and fare thee wells.

the withered sedge counts the hours and different ways,
dreams on the cliff’s edge of new green days.

and this I wanders between the thin weathers
watching the light stray as slow as sheep,
marking the orange and the gold on this fine day,
and a grace of blue sky hung for a moment
slung between Craig Du and the steeps of Pen Rhiwbie.

—

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this sky:
a pool of milk
and a pearl moon.

each breath begins
and ends with pause.
each word with memory
of its music.

we are fools who think
there is more than this,
not to see
the gorgeous depth
of each moment.

howling winds shudder
the ringing trees.
in the North, the sky
pours down upon the land.
rivers splay through hearts.
what was ours, swept away.

a little time, after all,
is all that ever remains.

a glowing tempest
wheels over winter.
a lie and a dream
is the peace within.
we become torn apart
only by beauty.
light split by tears
piercing the hills.

the roads are swept away,
the bridges broke.
we lose each war
that starts within ourselves,
each life
that is not lifted up
from the waves
with love.

—-

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ADVENT

1
A bitter edge.
Two ravens
Smudge motionless air.
A blessing it is
To have breath.

2
The slant of rain
Roars on rooftops again.
The fire, though, burns bright.
A blessing it is
To have breath.

3
A slow dawn.
The hills have yet to return
From their night journeys.

4
Oak’s iron hand.
Black veins
Holding what remains
Of sunlight.

5
A thousand galaxies
In the old man’s beard.
Sudden brightness
On a winter’s path.

6
A knot of dream,
Tangled,
Sinks down into darkness
Still wriggling.

7
Mercury and lead
Are the roads leading to emptiness.
Puddle-edged, empty,
They rise and fall
As if someone
Were watching.

8
Time slows,
Withers and stops.
Solstice.
Only the rain.

A blessing it is
To have breath.

—

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SCRIBBLE RIVER

1
The trees bend low,
The hills, open, roar.
The world spins fast
On its way to war.
2
Drenched in
Their own silence.
The hills.
Made cool and
Winged to the sky.
3
Tongue numbed:
The eloquence
Of tumbled waters.
4
Wind harp in melancholy minor
Sweeps, weeps and fades
Across the roofs,
Through the forest.
5
A flint
Struck from verse.
Bright words
Fly splutter
In endless rain.
A breathing on the roof,
Laughter soft in the gutters.
To measure out a little time
Upon this place.
6
By here we wander
Sullied by reason
And the oldest of stories.
Chained and unchained,
Livers pecked-
Our own hungry ambition.
7
We, unbecoming all,
Scatter aimless,
True to undiscovered dream
And the whispers of the greedy dead.
8
Here they speak
One long river of words.
A thrush by the waterside
Cracks a snail on green grey rock.

—

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