DAVY JONES’ WORD LOCKER
Deep his words are scratched
distorted by tidal distance, and pain, of course.
Long held loved-life pain, mummy-wrapped,
a preserving soul awaiting the hooked tool,
the opening of the mouth, to set them free.
The opening of the mouth –
the filling with light the scooped out flesh,
time-lost and tick by tock forgetting itself and all others.
Simple jar, an ornament, animal-headed,
offered to a wishful more solid shadeless realm
where the river goes nightly snaking through stars
and demons of compassionate mien.
Look now, they have sunk down as little fishes do,
hardly visible in their flickering hoards,
heads all directed upstream,
tails adjusting the moment by moment shift,
the subtle current antediluvian and troglodyte
that darkness holds and darkness knows
and from where the long echoes come down to now and here,
squirming in bright sunlight, as discomforted
as new souls before that throne of heaven.
Food for future is the furnace ash of the past,
swirling dance through stormy hearts and on on
to horizons bruised with miles and the songs of shepherds,
the summer roads, the autumn mists,
the winter byres, the springtime gales.
Spiked bloody the blessed blackthorn,
ragged moaning white and lovely there
in the cloud scud, breathless beast,
the corner turned,
an other mirror water-washed face wanting the new now,
the new now, the new feeling, to shuck old skin and feel the pulsing rebirth,
full-coloured, unrubbed, unworn,
glorious song of shining scale
and the catching scent on warmer breeze,
the future ripening there wrapped in web and goose grass.
Smut-black burnett nods along the roads,
And knapweed royally crowned in chivied clumps,
And the catch of breath, the sigh of heart,
All the remembering, all the forgetting there.
Four chambers, the world fills then breathes out:
Season’s tides that ride our dancing spin
To and fro the centre, found and lost, found and lost.
A rainbowed life wove full, wove tight.
–
The poetry of David Jones is intense, obscure and completely magical. It redefines the processes of poetry whilst revealing the labyrinthine workings of the deep mind. I know many people get upset by the obscure and occult symbolism of some poetry, mainly because they ‘don’t know what it means’. But the whole point of poetry is that it can stretch language beyond the mundane meanings. David Jones does at least provide some notes to explain his sources, which are fascinating in themselves. This poem of mine came as the result of a reading session. Playing with the idea of both the power of his words, and drawings from the ancient and the new in the Welsh bardic tradition, my associations flow to ‘Davy Jones’s Locker’ – the bottom of the sea – , and the Egyptian rite of Opening Of The Mouth, where the essence/soul of the mummified corpse is released from the mouth to continue its Otherworld journey ( a kenning for the power of the inspired word if wver there was one).
