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Posts Tagged ‘photography’

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ENCLOSURE OF CONFLUENCE

The dead roll and slip downhill
Chasing their bouncing heads,
Big as cheeses, down to the midstream island,
Fish-shaped and floundering in summer shallows
(it not having rained a whole day yet).

A hullaballoo choired
By the black flung jackdaws
Skimming the tiles, sound bouncing
Off the echoing bells.
Low droop the days.

How jolly the dreams
Of froth and fuschia bud
Dripping red from garden walls.

So quiet as to hear every noise,
Here in the round mouth of eternity:
The splitting rock, the lichen creep,
The self-taught letters silent mouthed
Born such and such, died such and such,
A good day ended, ne’er forgot,
Bearing many loving children.

Where now our utter quiet and wild-eyed saints?
Perched on their hills, blessing miraculous waters,
Passionate for the bigness of God,
Spread winged and leaping
Into skies of echoing praise.
Turn serpent-like to the steady pilgrimage,
Our certain roads,
These small piled eggs of pure white quartz,
The sign and signature for hard days
And steady hearts – an offered hope.

All here where two streams mingle,
The inner and the outer path.
A melancholy garden, neat kept and bordered.
Beyond the quiet lanes and clean swept steps
Another place altogether
Blowsy and careless with candles and dust,
An accumulated pigment, sun faded.

The glorious stars, an ocean
Upon which a silver bowl
Of tipping moon
Will late, near dawn, arise.

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Swathed, mist cool
Tasting blue dawn
As still as an egg

Hushed as only August can be
Held in a lap of seasons
Replete, ripening,
Remembered now
The bite that is frost,
The gradual fall inwards.

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TWO BY BEULAH

1
A break in the cloud:
A mouth of light
Drifts slowly over Beulah.
Dawn cannot be long.

Bats flicker vision,
A fluttering heartbeat.
Warm air, rain-wet
And rose-heavy.

2
The road sways soft
Down to Beulah.

Drowsy with valerian,
Hammocked easy
On sweet drift meadowsweet.

Awake the spired, serry willowherb,
And betony: scatter of exclamation.

We float light upon
Our own bright shadows.
The afternoon sun
And cloud valleys singing.

The road down to Beulah
Under the mountain.

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Under a silent sky
Stretched with cloud,
Grasses loll green and pink and grey.

A firmament of birdsong
Curled, woven to sift shading green.

Tractors sigh and roar down the lanes.
Fields turned now and mown.

Stay quiet, stay still a while,
Hear how the river mumbles.

Fed we are,
Appeased by the width of things:

The deep caverned wood,
The slow, fine rains,
Flowers, now, of cloud.

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THE VAPOURS OF HEAVEN

 

Shall they stray far,
These wandered thoughts,
Drenched with the vapours of heaven?
Shall they, distilled, sublimate,
Take new form, grow winged
Then smiling, dissolve?

Shall they, folded,
Nest upon timeless light.
Sleep, and wake golden,
Luminous, singing?
Shall they, without surcease,
Dance eternal energies,
Still named, at home
On vast, breathing cascades
Of space?

Shall they, (these thoughts),
Turn swallows, spin as swifts,
Light as thistledown, rise
Like willowherb, weightless,
A drift in summer,
A slow gentle breeze
Bird-filled?

Shall they stretch, sprout nerves,
Become sensible, grow good souls
With new names, find mouths
And lips and tongue
And sing their own song?

The vapours of heaven:
A saffron casket, rainbow-locked.
Small whispered bells,
Honey-lipped bees.

A sky stretched
To blue transparency.
A tent with purpose,
An unseen sea,
Scaled skin of cloud.

In amongst and between,
Within cloud and moving mists,
Droplets suspended awaiting surface:
To acquire direction, to know gravity,
To locate tidal choirs.

It is all music, all music,
Nothing but song.

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These images are taken from a series of ink drawings, scanned and photographically enlarged to reveal strange details. The revealing of other structures formed a parallel word stream imagining thought/word becoming sentient of themselves, hence the text, as one possible accompaniment to the images. (Other possibilities included star names or quotes from the works of John Dee). Some of the images are pixelating because of extreme enlargement, so these I may remake as pencil drawings…

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SCRY

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1
Small things
From deep pools
We rise.
Vaporous things lifting,
Turning,
Weightless drifting.
A lick and dissolve,
Ice smoke, sighing, aimless
Rise, spin, twist and dissolve,
A white fade lift,
A tongue, forgetful, vague.
Without a mirror, you see,
We scatter.

2
The falling down of words
Like honey bees or like rain.
They shall patter and gather together.
They shall wash away all dust of death.
They shall be as mirrors
And as suns.

3
Johannes, named from a river
Forever flowing east,
Named from the delta of Aphrodite
And the Aegyptians,
Of perfect memory and skill mathematic.
A subtle blade, enough to wriggle between worlds,
Searching the point between brightness and darkness.

4
All the cities are dying.
Accursed, they spread limp
And rot from centre outwards.
We have purchased all, yet still hunger, empty.

5
The view mists, fogs over.
A spray of rain and rose petal.
Summon the spirits again, Edward.
Summon again the blast of visions.
I have learned the language of angels
And now they pester me
As flies in summer meadows.
The kings and queens of England
Process in elegant spite, shifty-eyed,
Blaming cousins and the fickleness of peasants.

6
Around the garden walls,
Drab sparrows squabbling,
Happy as morning.
In the hills again,
Lost in mists,
Tight-lipped hunters.

7
Those accustomed to gaze and gaze
Letting in the world unmasked, unaltered,
Though they disappear, remain behind each edge
Every line of silver,
Seared into time’s retina.
Like Padmasambhava’s cave,
Taking up his body’s shape,
A perfect void forever sitting,
Open mind, open heart, unclassified,
Uncategorised, a species beyond light,
A ripple cascading throne,
A point through stillness, through reflection,
Through mirrored glare.
The eyes that look back
At all eyes,
Time collapsed to a breath,
Space folded
To a golden nest,
A beer relished at evening.

8
The sacred,
Always a little smutty,
To these men of science.
A vermilion stone smeared with faith.

9
So slight is the edge that shines,
The mirror’s reflectant skin.
So small a thing to throw back vision,
To show what is and is not there.
Such a line between, ( if line there is),
Seen and unseen.
So fragile a mechanism
To construct comprehension.
We settle to a silver lie,
Satisfied with thin smiles.

10
The eyes may tear something new from light.
New stranger seeds, planted in sight,
Doubts of how deep and shallow
All this reflected life might be.
God buried deep in the liver of a fool.
The Devil buried deeper in his reason.
Rise and fall, a history of empires
In this one small breath.
The same elements congeal
In madmen and in stars.
Somewhere a sun shall rise
And we shall be young
And beautiful again.

11
They push through our bitter fictions,
A stain within vast humid dream.
Spirit filled are the worlds elsewhere
Engraving slowly, they take form line by line.
Removed are the curls of nascence
A ticking clock, a creak, a shadow.

12
It is not malevolent to desire survival,
To thrust through to bigger life.
We are pushed and torn apart
As natural as morning, an evolution of sorts.
Best not, then, weigh nor judge,
(All, after all, the mockery of self
And self-existence).
A fly lands and takes off,
A pest, a nuisance, slow in slow air,
But what if, what if.

13
Our prevalence, our striding
Incessant self-portraiture:
A mistake, a neurosis, surely.
A better view must prevail,
A breaking through of stronger stories,
Radiant gods with heads of eagles,
Sky gods with lightning hair.
Beyond a mirror’s glass
That thin veil allowing silvered vision,
Presumes a surface woven illusion.
So many haunted eyes,

14
The utter strangeness of it.
A timed lapse, a void, a flicker.
Dark matter, the deep fog,
A sunless pressure, trenched, ocean deep.
Black smokers blistering more strange life.
We become utterly replaced again.

15
A charming magus chants destruction
And parturition in one caught breath.
The wonder is we do not see
How small and fast, how struggled and unfree,
How lost and how imprecise,
How glorious and how wrong.

16
The wise remain silent,
Watching skies unutterably changed.
I cannot say with whose voice for sure,
Or whence or from when.
A slight recorder.
A wave front.
A gravity well.
A spinning top
Each second more slowly.
The grate of opening
And closing doors.

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MERDDIN WYLLT BY THE FIRESIDE ( from Book of Voices)

I wear my clothes counterclockwise.
My shoes on backwards.
I know the squint.
The footprints, sprait and scent
Of demons and angels,
Know the words for weed and herb.
I tread with care, can recite
The tree of ancestors, the cries of beasts,
The line unbroken back
To warrior gods and giants.
And yet I cannot cast from me
The dream of endless cities,
The cantankerous clamour
Of the multitude, dull and deceitful.
I am good and bad with art and skill
Yet cannot unpeel from eyes this
Pall of paltry appeasements,
The children of lack walking
Endless square desolation
Who know too much,
But in the wrong ordering;
Whose priests draw paper gold
And silver dust
From bellies disbelieving and gnawed;
Whose bones grate chalk and sleepless;
Whose days neat piled and numbered,
A clarity of vast apathy, bright coloured
In flicker cold fires.
Stumbling through floods,
Warring ever the wrong foes,
Unbelieved, unbelieving,
A roaring tumble to consensual void.
We shall slam, it seems, to senselessness,
Yard by yard, ungrow, untend, untread,
Grow slim and thin and lustreless;
Leafless in Spring, sapless in dawn,
Know neither sun nor moon;
Shun light, fear dark, ignore warnings.
The stories new and feckless
Repeated endlessly, a lullaby
Of excuse.
Eaten up, burnt, gagged on smoke,
A scum of oil, a bitter silence,
A wormwood of tears.

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( The Book of Voices will be a work of pieces arrived at by chance, words floated insistently at random times, other voices, mine or from elsewhere, who can say…)

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A feathered crouch
Cool and slewed wind

Mountains hunch
Shuffle in and out

Tides of rain
A slow long tune.

A green nation
Rules the cuckoo’s voice

Stretched long the river rings
Vivid is the wood

Tousled the tall larch
Fathoms deep the bluebell haze

Grey and dappled
All sorrow weighed with joy

In tonsured cities
Days careful are numbered
Then forgot.

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LLYM AWEL, verse 8: Improvisations.

Ottid eiry, tohid istrad;
Diuryssini vy keduir y cad;
Mi nid aw; anaw ni’m gad
.

Falling snow, the wide valley covered;
They hasten, the warriors to war;
Myself, I do not go; a wound does not allow.

‘Istrad’ is not any vague ‘valley’, but an open, level or wide part of a valley floor, ( ‘dale’ or ‘strath’ are modern translations, suggesting gentle, cultivated land), distinguishing it from a steep or narrow-walled valley (cwm, combe, dingle, dell,)
‘Tohid’ could be ‘blanketed’, or ‘covered’. ‘Blanketed’ sounds too soft and benign, ‘smothered’ too dramatic. I’ve settled for ‘covered’ , though it seems a little pedestrian.
‘Keduir’ ( kedwir) are warriors, ‘cad’ is battle, but ‘warriors’ and ‘war’ is, perhaps, a better echo of the original sounds and semantics.
Each line ends with the same rhyme: istrad/cad/gad. The last line has a nice reflection in ‘..nid aw; anaw ni’m..’
There seems to be a disconnection between first and second lines. We are left wondering :what is the context? Is the landscape description simply to provide a scene through which the warriors move? Does it reflect the two events: a blanket of snow paralysing the fertile valley floor, the descent of the war-band on hapless neighbours? Is the snowfall a cover for an unexpected, aggressive assault?
There is a clear suggestion of the quiet, open space and silence of the valley contrasted with the fast moving, tightly animated, urgent group of warriors.
The stillness and emptiness of the landscape is echoed in the last line by the helplessness of the narrator left behind as his companions depart. Though there is no suggestion whether the narrator feels guilt or relief, we can see the view of the wide, empty snow-filled valley floor as a correlate for his physical, emotional and mental state.

Falling snow is valley’s shroud.
A warrior’s heart is vast and cold.
With skilled companions, open to chance,
Brave and proud.
A blizzard roar sweeping away all.

Unfathomable is the mind of a mountain;
The language of clouds: not easy to read,
a mystery sung by rivers.

The silence in waiting long.
Unkind the distance between here
And good company.
Vast and empty is the future
We fill with hope.
Empty and shelterless
Is the valley void of laughter.

Wide, white and shrouded
Is the green glory of the young.
Each year these wounds
And the memories of wounds
Pile up to muffle song.

A keening wind will bring tears,
Even to the strong.

Halt and bold,
Blood-smeared will be the footsteps
Of those who return.
Their tracks:
The lines of those before us,
All aches smoothed over,
Disappearing,
The wide, vast future
Brought sharp to a point:
One moment whole,
One moment severed.
Cut short,
All certainty
Reduced to dream,
All echoes dying away.

The groans of ice.
Frost-cracked, the stones split,
Gape skywards toothless:
The road and door
To other worlds.

Left lame, useless,
Not knowing.
Watching slow snow fall.
Hands without strength,
An empty mind trudges distances.
Goalless, remote, the hollow eyes.
A dry and empty cup.

The minds of mountains
And their clouds
Weep and rejoice.
Glory of sunlight
Spitting shadows.

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Spring
in Llangammarch:

Every house
a nest.

The cool air,
a wash of song;

The river,
a sighing.

Even in rain,
The sun enfolded

bright
In the heads
of daffodils.

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