A March Evening

Dusk fades to dark ¬ a half-moon and Venus ¬ equally bright in an indigo sky ¬ a blackbird singing ¬ the notes ringing ¬ bridging the brightness of day  ¬ and the deeps of the night. 

 Moon, Star and Bird of Rhiannon ¬ demarcations dissolving ¬ out of the air ¬ making otherness thisness ¬ a visiting presence  ¬ containing the darkness  ¬ insistently clear.

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Picture: detail from ‘Night Flight’ by Sarah Young

BEETLE

It ran sideways out of the leaf-litter, black&gold, living a life in a garden I regard as my domain, shaped here, pruned there, but not controlled. This beetle, dwelling beyond words, has its own life there unheeding, older than the garden and the hedgerow on the hillside and the oak tree in the field that was here before the houses, each ripple and fold of earth keeping its own time that ancestors of this beetle knew; insects untold have bred here until now, this instant of time in which I watch it scuttle off into leaf mould I have laid upon the the soil, stored and sifted for a winter mulch, where it will find a home, this beetle, this gift, a gem whose black&gold I cannot contain in my mind; but out there in the vastness of time that is the garden it lives, always new however old.

Castell Criccieth

Sun shimmering on sea ¬ watched from the arm of Llŷn ¬ from up on the castle rock ¬ gannets diving into glittering water ¬ and over on the far coast ¬ another castle and mountains touched by cloud ¬ Harddlech to which Matholwch’s ships come sailing ¬¬

A landscape, a seascape, with story ¬ the ships as vividly real as these gannets ¬ black-tipped wings stretched out as they plunge ¬ down through air and water ¬¬

Looking across at the southward sweep of the bay ¬ the story unfolds there and elsewhere ¬ then the ships returning ¬ Branwen with Matholwch sailing ¬ away to Ireland carrying ¬ a memory of mutilated horses ¬ a lingering history of these coasts, these castles ¬ the diving gannets & the glittering sea ¬ still here occupying the space of story ¬ the stilled waves yet holding ¬ echoes of troubled waters ¬ layers of time & not-time ¬ unfolding from the rippling tide ¬ quietly lapping a gritty shore. ¬¬

The Blinding of Polyphemus

“Kyklops, you ask for my name …..

No-one is my name … as all my friends call me.”

“ … well, I shall eat No-one last of his company.”

Odyssey IX

“No-one blinded me”, said Kyklops ~ an old joke embedded in a folk tale ~ contained for posterity in an epic poem ~  too good a story to be forgotten ~ “so”, they said, “nothing to be done  to no-one” ~ But as he sailed away he was someone ~ again boasting of what he had done ~ overheard by Poseidon ~ not anonymous to the god ~ so the sea roads he sailed ~ remembered him & sought his destruction ~ though other powers kept him whole ~ even a nereid from engulfing ocean ~ he was not bound to that destiny ~ this sea wolf but to some other outcome ~~

His grandfather Autolykos (does it mean ~ werewolf?) sent him out hunting ~ when a boar gored him it made him ~ a man long after that boyhood ~ it was the scar that revealed him ~ returned for his bow and the death ~ of the suitors~~

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“… there are two journeys

in every odyssey, one on worried water,

the other crouched and motionless

Derek Walcott Omeros LVIII, ii

Why go? Why stay? ~ if either will bring you to the same destination ~ the same changed state of mind ~ the sense of a journey undertaken ~ and now a return ~~

Only to set out again with an oar ~ to a land far from the sea ~ on a dry road to find ~ one who thought it a wand for winnowing ~ : to appease Poseidon ~~

In his hall he knew he had done this ~ however near or far he wandered ~ the god knew too ~ and that is what mattered.

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It was Tireisias, in the Land of the Dead, who predicted this ending and so it was woven into the story even though the tale ends before such things might happen. It is often a tale that looks backwards and forwards, chopping up the time spent on ‘worried water’, episodes from here & there, the end & the beginning looped together around other endings and preludes, caught by one ‘crouched and motionless’.

A Feather …..

….. settled on the threshold, drifted in ¬ from one of the martin nests in the eaves ¬ (chicks seem to shed them when flying ¬ for the first time to sail away on the air) ¬ but this one settled, made a claim for possession ¬ of the home the birds return to year on year. ¬ It seemed like a gift, as some claims are, ¬ a token of shared habitation right there ¬ at the entry to the house where we found it ¬ feathering a nest beyond the cup of mud ¬ stuck beneath the overhang of the roof tiles ¬ marking a gateway to the world.