A "pome" today, as I have lorst my passport and my son needs the details for HIS application. Sigh. I am not a tidy soul at the best of times and my worst-hated job (I would rather clean the slate kitchen floor with a toothbrush) is going through piles of old paperwork. I want to do a walk. I want to garden. Sigh.
Altarwise by Owl-Light
by Dylan Thomas
I Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
II Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;
The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
The planet-ducted pelican of circles
Weans on an artery the gender’s strip;
Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.
Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,
Are but the roots of nettles and of feathers
Over these groundworks thrusting through a pavement
And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.
III First there was the lamb on knocking knees
And three dead seasons on a climbing grave
That Adam’s wether in the flock of horns,
Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,
Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes
On thunderous pavements in the garden time;
Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle
Out of the wrinkled undertaker’s van,
And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,
Dipped me breast-deep in the descended bone;
The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,
Alone alive among his mutton fold,
We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,
Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.
IV What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper).
Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow).
What of a bamboo man among your acres?
Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?
Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,
My camel’s eyes will needle through the shrowd.
Love’s reflection of the mushroom features,
Stills snapped by night in the bread-sided field,
Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,
Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.
V And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,
From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,
The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;
Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,
Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.
Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night.
For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain,
Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger,
A climbing sea from Asia had me down
And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair,
Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel
Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa
By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil
And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw.
VI Cartoon of slashes on the tide-traced crater,
He in a book of water tallow-eyed
By lava’s light split through the oyster vowels
And burned sea silence on a wick of words.
Pluck, cock, my sea eye, said medusa’s scripture,
Lop, love, my fork tongue, said the pin-hilled nettle;
And love plucked out the stinging siren’s eye,
Old cock from nowheres lopped the minstrel tongue
Till tallow I blew from the wax’s tower
The fats of midnight when the salt was singing;
Adam, time’s joker, on a witch of cardboard
Spelt out the seven seas, an evil index,
The bagpipe-breasted ladies in the deadweed
Blew out the blood gauze through the wound of manwax.
VII Now stamp the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice,
A Bible-leaved of all the written woods
Strip to this tree: a rocking alphabet,
Genesis in the root, the scarecrow word,
And one light’s language in the book of trees.
Doom on deniers at the wind-turned statement.
Time’s tune my ladies with the teats of music,
The scaled sea-sawers, fix in a naked sponge
Who sucks the bell-voiced Adam out of magic,
Time, milk, and magic, from the world beginning.
Time is the tune my ladies lend their heartbreak,
From bald pavilions and the house of bread
Time tracks the sound of shape on man and cloud,
On rose and icicle the ringing handprint.
VIII This was the crucifixion on the mountain,
Time’s nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave
As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept;
The world’s my wound, God’s Mary in her grief,
Bent like three trees and bird-papped through her shift,
With pins for teardrops is the long wound’s woman.
This was the sky, Jack Christ; each minstrel angle
Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails
Till the three-coloured rainbow from my nipples
From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.
I by the tree of thieves, all glory’s sawbones,
Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,
And by this blowclock witness of the sun
Suffer the heaven’s children through my heartbeat.
IX From the oracular archives and the parchment,
Prophets and fibre kings in oil and letter,
The lamped calligrapher, the queen in splints,
Buckle to lint and cloth their natron footsteps,
Draw on the glove of prints, dead Cairo’s henna
Pour like a halo on the caps and serpents.
This was the resurrection in the desert,
Death from a bandage, rants the mask of scholars
Gold on such features, and the linen spirit
Weds my long gentleman to dusts and furies;
With priest and pharaoh bed my gentle wound,
World in the sand, on the triangle landscape,
With stones of odyssey for ash and garland
And rivers of the dead around my neck.
X Let the tale’s sailor from a Christian voyage
Atlaswise hold half-way off the dummy bay
Time’s ship-racked gospel on the globe I balance:
So shall winged harbours through the rockbirds’ eyes
Spot the blown word, and on the seas I image
December’s thorn screwed in a brow of holly.
Let the first Peter from a rainbow’s quayrail
Ask the tall fish swept from the bible east,
What rhubarb man peeled in her foam-blue channel
Has sown a flying garden round that sea-ghost?
Green as beginning, let the garden diving
Soar, with its two bark towers, to that Day
When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom
My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.
Wonderful words and phrases. I wish I understood it. I would love to have a session with my Eng. Lit. tutor when I was doing Access - she would break poetry (and prose) down and explain every breath . . .
Below: As you can see, it was quite diddy, but perhaps there is more hidden beneath the peat and tussock grass . . .
On the very top of Llanybydder Mountain, you can see the steeply banked trackways of old farmsteads, against the backdrop of mile upon mile of Forestry Commission pines. This is Brechfa Forest. They have one stage of the World (Car) Rally Championships here each year.
And when the logging company has been in . . .
The shabby little Village Hall, c. 1920ish I would think.
The little church of Llanfihangle-Rhos-y-Corn.
What a pretty pulpit with its sunflower motif.
There was a lovely maze put in the adjacent field, and as I walked around it, in reflection, I began to understand mazes - you couldn't cut corners or step across, you had to keep on to the end, nose to the grindstone, so to speak, in quiet contemplation . . .
J.J. with a date of 1869.
I wonder who M.E. was? I have a feeling they were in memory of children.
Looking back in the direction of home. Our valley begins with the last swell of hill.
A 'modernized' cottage snuggled down in the valley below.
The road is just ever so slightly zig-zag! The bend after this almost disappears up its own . . . You get the picture?!
