—————————————— HUMAN SHORES
BYRON BEYNON ——————————————
Belfast Lapwing
——————————————
HUMAN SHORES
BYRON BEYNON ——————————————
Belfast LAPWING
First Published by Lapwing Publications c/o 1, Ballysillan Drive Belfast BT14 8HQ lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry/ Copyright Š Byron Beynon 2012 All rights reserved The author has asserted her/his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Since before 1632 The Greig sept of the MacGregor Clan Has been printing and binding books
Lapwing Publications are printed at Kestrel Print Unit 1, Spectrum Centre Shankill Road Belfast BT13 3AA 028 90 319211 E:kestrelprint@btconnect.com Hand-bound in Belfast at the Winepress Set in Aldine 721 BT
ISBN 978-1-909252-07-3
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks are due to the editors of the following publications in which several of these poems first apppeared: Agenda, Bard, Big River Poetry Review (USA), Borderlines, Boyne Berries, Broken Wine, Camel Saloon (USA), Cyphers, Envoi, Fire, Flutter Poetry Journal (USA), The Interpreter’s House, Iota, Island, London Magazine, Nineties Poetry, Northwords, Oasis, Other Poetry, Outposts, Pennine Platform, Poetry Wales, Roundyhouse, The Seventh Quarry, Red Poppy Review (USA), Snakeskin, Splash of Red (USA), The Swansea Review, Understanding, The Warwick Review, Wasafiri, Windmills (Australia), Write Me A Metaphor (Bahrain).
The anthologies: The Third Day: Landscape &The Word (Gomer 1995) Sentinel Annual Literature Anthology (SPM Publications London 2011)
Selected Publications: Winter over Nantyglo (Stride 1984) The Girl in the Yellow Dress (Stride 1986) The Restaurant of Mud (Stride 1993) Rembrandt’s House (BernardStone’s Turret Books 1997) Cuffs (Rack Press 2008) Nocturne In Blue (Lapwing Publications 2009)
iii
CONTENTS AT THE GRAVE OF HENRY VAUGHAN CAREW THE HERON THE ATMOSPHERE CLEARS THE SKETCH GOLEUDY RHYDWEN WORM’S HEAD SÂM VIOLA DUNES MOZART’S FINAL SUMMER
1791
BEETHOVEN’S TUNING FORK DEHEUBARTH HORSES IN THE RAIN AT LLANSTEFFAN LLANRHIDIAN MARSH PENTRE IFAN DOLPHINS WES MONTGOMERY PLAYED AT BUNHILL FIELDS LATE TWILIGHT
iv
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
ZONE
28 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47
NOTES:
48
MASKS DINNER AT HAYDON’S A DOG BARKING THE RED KITE NEAR THE TROPIC OF CANCER IN THE RAFFLES HOTEL DRIVE-IN MELBOURNE TOWARDS PORT MACQUARIE HEDD WYN EDWARD THOMAS’S POCKET WATCH BEFORE NEUTRAL TIME TERRA NOVA DEPORTATION IDRIS DAVIES AT REST BAY, PORTHCAWL THE CALIFORNIA CONDOR CASTELL COCH WOODPECKER IN WINTER THE YELLOW BOOKS, PARISIAN NOVELS
v
1952
vi
Byron Beynon
AT THE GRAVE OF HENRY VAUGHAN in memory of Raymond Garlick
This earth cradles a light which fathered words, painted cadences and the unavoidable bell as slow circles spread throughout dispersed fields of another time; the movement of shivering leaves, a shadow of the tree fixed in readiness for the morning stars, enduring through the winter frost with the heart’s mind preserved on a resilient page.
7
Human Shores
CAREW
Here the adjectives of place gather like troubled rain, the hard prayer achieved when eyes smart with memory under a sky’s smudged window; the worn hour pressed upon the trellised mind, a charm of fields holding the past and future, scenting the resurrected air the subconscious forages for a rare meaning beyond the moonwashed stars.
8
Byron Beynon
THE HERON
The heron sieves the water with his eyes, eliminates the trick of light, side-glances this porous territory where he resides, a watchman wading the feeding grounds for his quota each day, standing still, concentrating on the wrinkled flow beneath him; his true shore drifting home the long way where borders pass under strange skies, his eddy mirrored and sculpted in a resolute conduit.
9
Human Shores
THE ATMOSPHERE CLEARS
The sound of doors shutting inside anonymous rooms during the quiet hours when there is still light rusting in a remote sky; the atmosphere clears like a table after a meal, the long distance of yesterday creeps in faded like a memory caught in a yellow beam, untouchable like a silent photograph developed in the mind, retention breathing inside a native ground patient as discovery.
10
Byron Beynon
THE SKETCH
My father once sketched my mother recovering in bed from a miscarriage, the hurt he never revealed but exorcized in their room, corners of silence as she slept unaware; a hard pencil working the shadow of moist grief from his mind, his hand moving across the page to capture the crystalline mirror of the moment, losing himself on the paper’s cheekbones in rhythm with senses which gazed for so long as the rain-swept afternoon continued without respite, a wasteland of hope under a patchwork which neither memory nor heart could erase.
11
Human Shores
GOLEUDY RHYDWEN
Out there, where the air screams, darkness is measured in fathoms; in the complex sea, sensing the swift running of the incoming currents, knowing where the padlocked
rooms of the drowned can be found, the upright body of cast-iron, a solid marker, motionless like a chess piece against the common sky, in solitude it listens for lost voices as foam flutes high from
the wet wildness beneath the water’s probing fingers, where frozen echoes remain concealed.
12
Byron Beynon
WORM’S HEAD
A summer sea near the Harbour View hotel telescopes where my father lived as a teenager towards the end of war. Exposed, a glassy plateau with the vulnerable mud richly inhabited by christened vessels, their masts like cocktail sticks, a scarred and printed massif with pedestrians of gulls; the treacherous flow of daily water through narrow channels, ordinary lives in a house which survived the spiraling bombs, the blade and blast against the door. The weight of tide turns once more, a movement of shadow shifts with the breeze, a human craft shaped like clay on a potter’s wheel.
13
Human Shores
SĂ‚M
The white geometry of solid fat would begin to thaw and slide in the warm pan, where in the kitchen my mother focused herself preparing an assembly of ingredients, each graded minute timed for consistency; the savoury trail remembered from a moment lived, the sharp reminder for the senses, a fragrance served as bubbles blinked in a meltdown above a blue pattern of spears.
14
Byron Beynon
VIOLA
My mother walks her garden, directs me with a smile to the viola the word growing at her feet.
15
Human Shores
DUNES
The gilt and gauffered edges of childhood; looking back towards those dunes and sky where a new world haunted his dreams with play, a rush of daring, a surprise of laughter with a wonder of mystery in his ears; he searches across his possession of years, the roads taken with no way back, his memorized song set free and the sudden awakening which appeared before his eyes.
16
Byron Beynon
MOZART’S FINAL SUMMER 1791
The days are full of light; in Vienna Constanze gives birth to their sixth child as Mozart’s final summer moves inside city walls with medieval streets. Tall buildings, the Danube, fields which burn, manuscripts, musicians, months of carriages vibrating on cobbled quadrangles, where sounds soared in the overworked mind with notes composed for the messenger who like an infant pulled at the hem of a travelling cloak.
17
Human Shores
BEETHOVEN’S TUNING FORK
A memory within music, a ripening with vineyards overgrown, and your mind’s ear in tune; alert with days you look through a small window at strangers, the relentless wave-pulse, uncorked knowledge on a journey through a territory where time gathers shards of meaning. A frustration of the heart’s burning sound, your quiet breath of power blurring with the grey rain.
18
Byron Beynon
DEHEUBARTH
The birds know the contours of this place; each wing echoes across corduroy fields through which rivers inscribe their unique names, reflex of flight and the oracle of the sky hold at night their darkness in caves of sleep. A movement born when air is a great stream, the ancient jewels of light with clawed voices drink and eat the morning vision of wine and bread; each hammered cross they recognise, with a rage of stars from foot to head, the unrelenting recall of their intimate calligraphy.
19
Human Shores
HORSES IN THE RAIN
For long hours the horses have stood in the rain, in landscapes washed by a stained canvas of sky, quenched grass, a bruised green, they occupy a torso of field knowing the squall of the day will pass, the focus of their stare beyond hedges shaped by the wind; from the Bucephalus of history they sense ancestors at wars, loaded carts and carriages pulled through mud, a focus within art, the racing-reelers of cinema, each eye haunted by echoes of arid plains as the jewelled water exudes over them.
20
Byron Beynon
AT LLANSTEFFAN for Aida and Terry
The landscape’s identity of fields, river and sea, with a castle’s promontory measured by shadows cast from the violent sun. The skittish voice of a different tide, the eloquence of the moon’s light as the evening sky dazzles with antiquity, a cabin’s wall of music orchestrates the moving round of water and woven sound as a signal of watch-tower observes a natural embrace, with the supple Tywi meeting the breaking beat of sculpture, a gallery dismantled on the shore’s rummaged face.
21
Human Shores
LLANRHIDIAN MARSH
The language of saltmarsh with muddy creeks, durable ponies, reflected light eagerly awaiting the ebbings of signs to be read; nature’s art a bonus for the enduring senses to reach across, meanings that draw the quiet eye within, capturing a sudden scape, constant moods which return here, a scenery of performances caught on a physical stage.
22
Byron Beynon
PENTRE IFAN
Flowers of May in the lanes, with an energy of air threading the day with warmth and life closer to the undimmed sun; resilient, silent stones, sublime and transient, eyes which have gazed into the distance, witnessed constant moods, filled the ticking mind with memory and claimed briefly the place for keeping, without change or pretence fresh-faced time reflecting on the impartial sea as a new dawn explodes.
23
Human Shores
DOLPHINS
These are the jewels that only the sharp eye can imagine, the humility of nature primed liked explosives to shock the unsuspecting mind; an interval when knowledge can intervene on this arched journey, as time’s technology pauses allowing the laboratory of the senses to arrive.
24
Byron Beynon
WES MONTGOMERY PLAYED
Wes Montgomery played guitar without a pick, his thumb chose the one at the Turf bar with a single note that ran fresh with a form unique. His solo compressed chords moved along future passages with a lively melody tight with action, his self-taught fingers high on natural style.
25
Human Shores
AT BUNHILL FIELDS
By late morning I could hear the screams of children at play under a flourishing sky of navigable blue. Before Blake’s headstone a discarded daffodil dying near the green railings safeguarded from the roadworks and blown litter by the corporation. Here witnesses gathered for a funeral as a fifteen year old girl was laid to rest, the surviving trees and the forgotten graves listened for the steps on dry paving stones, the high-rise sunshine on the faces of flats and offices, the occupied fingers of stone which point towards the growth of an unsettled eternity.
26
Byron Beynon
LATE TWILIGHT after the artist, Samuel Palmer
Always the hills and those strange minutes when the light begins to fade caught by the conscious eye; all the working day’s reflections meet here with an antique silence, deep and motionless a pierced earth broken and opened for the coming elements, the sky scarred on the memory, with a styled pathway crossed by an echo from a horned moon.
27
Human Shores
MASKS William Wordsworth Life-Mask, taken for B R Haydon, 1815
Threading your way through the busy June streets I imagined you’d arrive for your appointment on time, the punctual signature of good manners; sitting calmly inside a house the artist recorded in his diary his triple opinions of you as steady, sedate, and solemn, bearing your face like a philosopher a point of view patiently added to history’s anecdotes like the flight of the words to a page.
28
Byron Beynon
John Keats Life-Mask, probably taken by B R Haydon, 1816
Kates, Ceates, Keate to Keats, John Keats, twenty-one, his face greased, the chin towelled, the mouth shut and the plaster prepared. A mask from life, an eventual gift to Reynolds; the urgency, the time brisk with youth, the early quarter of a century witnesses a revival, an open fashion, casting for the lines unborn he sits polite and alone in the chair impatiently.
29
Human Shores
DINNER AT HAYDON’S
The crowded society of weeks in a busy London month. Endymion’s already completed, his brothers have left for the Teignmouth air. At Haydon’s on a late December afternoon the “immortal dinner” at three o’clock; Keats relaxes his mood, meets Wordsworth at the back of the house in a spacious painting-room. They sit at a table set beneath the unfinished picture of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem”. The wine-glow of firelight, shadows, talk, and Lamb’s antics, courses served in time, the savoury layers experienced at the close of a roving year.
30
Byron Beynon
A DOG BARKING
A dog barking at regular intervals reminds me that I am not alone, he wakes the morning with his growing sense of injustice, he warns the day, his eager rage renewed against fits of sound that interrupt the hours. Tonight he’ll dream with moonlight and starlight, chase shadows across a kissed field, wake with dew in his eyes.
31
Human Shores
THE RED KITE
From the wilderness of air where the dismissive winds blow, you plunder and scavenge to the earth below like an aeronautical poacher, a razor eyed weight on edge and alert with hunger, a forked tail survivor resilient and controlled, the sky’s natural blade unsheathed tearing at a favoured meal during the new hours of summer; a wing span and beak with a design focused on the changing concerns of territory, the sun’s brutal shadow, a sway of taut breath, feathers out-fanned clutching at the dawn of blood, at home with the ruined and instinctive prey of your scattered horizons.
32
Byron Beynon
NEAR THE TROPIC OF CANCER
Uniformed guards, their thoughts masked by cold automatic weapons stand by green and blue fountains alert to suspicious movements which occur once they have turned their disciplined backs.
33
Human Shores
IN THE RAFFLES HOTEL
In the Raffles Hotel there are tiger prints on the floor. Reputation can often disappoint in this minty atmosphere. The sling is expensive, at the long bar there is beer and plenty of ice. Cool green of bamboo chairs, the Tiffin room and tea being served, as a woman wearing curlers sunbathes in the garden, drying her hair in the noisy Singapore heat. Haunts of dead writers and the readable past, names that drop from a case full to the brim, Kipling, Maughan, Coward and Conrad all stayed here with personalities, party-goers in fancy-dress, has-beens and ‘I’ve forgotten his name’, staring and smiling from numberless photographs their faces holding the pose and turning their minds to future keys. 34
Byron Beynon
DRIVE-IN MELBOURNE
The river Yarra cuts and motions in a city with drive-in bakeries, bottle-shops, cinemas, and fast-foods, claiming a title like a contender “the cultural centre of Australia”, I expected to find a drive-in bookshop and art gallery. The joke of weather as four distinct seasons appear in one day, as trams, solid as liners skate their yellow and green livery through the centre, around the Ivanhoe of suburbia. Place of Ned Kelly’s nemesis, he plunged without armour into the darkness of the scaffold. Near the Young & Jacksons hotel I witnessed an agricultural parade down energetic Swanston street, as fifteen hundred merino commuted towards Flinders station, followed by a farmyard of goats, horses, and dogs. In Australia there is always more space as days leap over younger shoulders in a city beyond Europe, an origin of tragedy brought at first tide by the sea. 35
Human Shores
TOWARDS PORT MACQUARIE
It is another route we follow through New South Wales, replanted suburbia with radio accents heavy with thundery skies, Newcastle and Swansea, names transported along the Pacific highway; the deluge continued to the Pelican shore, with waves scanned by hungry gulls who rallied against the slate hardened sky, echoes unsubdued as the pulse of birds soared with the surviving music of the sea.
36
Byron Beynon
HEDD WYN
A chair draped in black stands empty on a stage. The strict metres of words have already been written. Evening has fallen like a veil over Pilken Ridge. Silhouettes of a broken time lie still as the mysterious earth spins. The bronze statue of a shepherd cools in the Trawsfynydd air. A quiet room in a farmhouse, the secret shapes of disordered dreams, the unfulfilled atmosphere of closed books that remain on tables.
37
Human Shores
EDWARD THOMAS’S POCKET WATCH
I wonder if the watch that Thomas kept inside his soldier’s pocket found its way home by fate’s dislocation or by degree to eventually enter a display inside a capital’s museum, where crisp words explained why hands and heart stopped by the blast killed his time and walk, while nearby the disturbed Arras mud blossomed in early April.
38
Byron Beynon
BEFORE NEUTRAL TIME
Not an old man, but a face worked on by life and those late evenings when he’d speculate the bars with his friends to drink a favourite share. His voice recalled when on one darkcoated night, the biting stars pierced the skin, I saw him brought into the swaggering light of a public house, two men held him by the arms, he paused for breath, and sang in Welsh a verse or two in remembered pitch. After the applause and dizzy glass, he was gone, the strong impulse to move on before neutral time called on him. 39
Human Shores
TERRA NOVA
Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition enters the polluted mouth of Cardiff bay. A gift of Welsh coal form the mine-owners feeds the bunkers of the Terra Nova. Excited crowds move and explore their day through Butetown, a greeting of flags and sirens the hooting of salty horns adds to the din in a paraphernalia of local sound. High-geared Edgar Evans of Rhossili sails south again, keeps his final appointment with the Beardmore Glacier. Titus Oates opens his diary, calls the mayor and corporation a mob, disapproves of the noise, sees the telephone operator as the only gentleman to come aboard. Fragments that slowly thaw from the history books, a ship, a crew, the inescapable five disappear from the port, a polar wind that ruffled the vessel from its quay. 40
Byron Beynon
DEPORTATION
They have remembered the victims with lights and golden triangles by the Seine, where an old man with history to repeat spoke of camps, Munich, five years, the Americans who arrived to free his indelible speech for visitors in broken English to hear by the river where his words froze into a space of fear. Here he crossed the water of decades, returned there each day, the survivor, unable to forget.
41
Human Shores
IDRIS DAVIES AT REST BAY, PORTHCAWL 1952
Over five decades since you convalesced there I am offered a lift to that same home where on a morning of agitated sea and beneath the sky’s dudgeon I think now of you lost in that dying shaft, absolute and ageless as eternity.
42
Byron Beynon
THE CALIFORNIA CONDOR “man treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the same, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads� Chief Seattle of the Duwamish League
We have looked up at the settled sky at midnight when the faithful moon searches the blue shadows of a blue land tortured and broken as unique patterns of flight disappeared before dawn; the hunter, the hunted, the menace of a lost inheritance, as the wind stings secret minds to open like our rare wings before only echoes and silhouettes remain.
43
Human Shores
CASTELL COCH
It could have been uprooted from the high banks of a Rhinescape valley, the conical turrets of this red castle at home in a Victorian pre-Disneyland, where later Alan Ladd pretended in chains to be its only recorded prisoner. There are of course more substantial castles in Wales, reliably ancient, a pedigree, without the intervention or riches of a Burges or a Bute, but phoenix jokes of sandstone in a Welsh fairyland could be what sham history is all about.
44
Byron Beynon
WOODPECKER IN WINTER
A low winter sun, its yellow rays like cold girders angle the vulnerable trees as a woodpecker catches the light’s fading eye; he anchors himself to the bark, some impulse within flits to a different task, his woodscape, found headlands to radiate his mark, those inlays flashed into place, his tiny script of wonderment brought to a working day’s perfection.
45
Human Shores
THE YELLOW BOOKS, PARISIAN NOVELS after the painting by Vincent Van Gogh
A passion of bright yellow books lie scattered on a table. The love for them you described as sacred as the love of Rembrandt. The self-study of language and style compared to an artist’s brush. Here there are no titles on jackets, only the sensations that turn the eye towards the unseen man with a fever for colours.
46
Byron Beynon
ZONE
A plain vase with flowers on the sill of a house faces the clothes line hung in a February alleyway transformed today into a necklace worn by Venus, queen of laughter, mother of love, rich globules of liquid pearls which mirror a benevolent zone’s splendour after the rain.
47
Human Shores
NOTES:
GOLEUDY RHYDWEN: is the Welsh for the Whiteford Lighthouse
SÂM: is the Welsh for liquid cooking fat
HEDD WYN: was Ellis Humphrey Evans (1887- 1917) poet, killed in France during the First World War. At the National Eisteddfod of 1917 his poem was awarded the Chair, it was announced that he had been killed in action and the Chair was draped in black.
IDRIS DAVIES: (1905 – 1953 ) Poet, born at Rhymney, Wales. Published at Faber & Faber by TS Eliot who wrote about Davies’ work as being ‘ the best poetic document I know about a particular epoch in a particular place, and I think that they really have a claim to permanence.’
48
L A P W I N G PUB L I C A T I O N S
BYRON BEYNON
Born in Swansea and brought up in Carmarthenshire. He has lived and worked in London, Cardiff, Norway, France and Australia. His previous publication by Lapwing, entitled Nocturne In Blue, was reviewed in Seventh Quarry magazine and described as “A collection of striking and polished poems by a poet totally in charge of his craftsmanship. His poetic voice warm and direct, engages page after page, and his use of words is weighted with authority and authenticity. So many of his lines delight in their alert capturing of his perceived world and his experiences. He really illustrates William Cowper’s comment that ‘There is pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know.’” His work has appeared in numerous publications including Poetry Wales, Cyphers, Grey Borders (Canada), Quadrant, Istanbul Literary Review, Planet and The Warwick Review. Recently his poems and articles have also appeared in the anthologies: Evan Walters: Moments of Vision (Seren Books 2011 ); Long Island Sounds (New York 2009); Contemporary Literary Horizon (University of Bucharest, Romania 2010 ); and The Muse ( India 2011).
from other reviews: “Beynon achieves a lyrical style beauty.....” Duncan Glen in Lines Review “The poems sit mellow in perfect space....read them slowly, let their words stay with you. That’s what poetry does best,” Peter Finch in The Insider To hear Byron Beynon reading three of his poems (one in Welsh) please visit the poetcasting website, the link for which is: http ://www.poetcasting.co.uk/?p= 118 The Lapwing is a bird, in Irish lore - so it has been written indicative of hope. Printed by Kestrel Print Hand-bound at the Winepress, Ireland
ISBN 978-1-909252-07-3
£10.00