Jeunesse Perdue

I’m the child of rainy Sundays. I watched time crawl Like an injured fly Over the wet windowpane. Or waited for a branch On a tree to stop shaking, While Grandmother knitted Making a ball of yarn Roll over like a kitten at her feet. I knew every clock in the house Had stopped ticking And that this day will last forever.

How far and wide about the upper and the lower bay, along the rivers and beside the sea, how close and evenly the street lamps shine: you shall know the forests of your fathers among these posts, and you their deserts upon these miles of pavement whose mica glistens in the sunlight and the lamplight, in the heat of summer or the frost of winter, wet with rain or white with snow. Though your tribe is the smallest and you are the least, you shall speak, you shall drill, you shall war; and, dying, wheeled away so swiftly you see the sun no larger than the evening star, their boots shall carry your blood— its corpuscles seeds that will grow in the sandy lots, between the cobblestones of alleys and on the pavement of avenues.

Job Davies, eighty-five Winters old, and still alive After the slow poison And treachery of the seasons. Miserable? Kick my arse! It needs more than the rain’s hearse, Wind-drawn, to pull me off The great perch of my laugh. What’s living but courage? Paunch full of hot porridge, Nerves strengthened with tea, Peat-black, dawn found me Mowing where the grass grew, Bearded with golden dew. Rhythm of the long scythe Kept this tall frame lithe. What to do? Stay green. Never mind the machine, Whose fuel is human souls. Live large, man, and dream small.

My soul is an empty carousel at sunset.

At night oil lamps burn in their small windows And blocks of pressed peat glow in a simple fireplace. Arc lamps on the new refinery at the point Answer their lights; there is blackness and the sound of surf. They are so alike that they have no need to speak, Like oppressed orphans who have won a fierce privacy.

Neighbours lent her a tall feathery dog to make her expedition seem natural. She couldn’t really fancy a walk alone, drawn though she was to the shawled whiteness, the flung drifts of wool. She was not a walker. Her winter pleasures were in firelit rooms – entertaining friends with inventive dishes or with sherry, conversation, palm-reading: ‘You’ve suffered,’ she’d say. ‘Of course, life is suffering…’ holding a wrist with her little puffy hand older than her face. She was writing a novel. But today there was the common smothered in snow, blanked-out, white as meringue, the paths gone: a few mounds of bracken spikily veiled and the rest smooth succulence. They pocked it, she and the dog; they wrote on it with their feet – her suede boots, his bright flurrying paws. It was their snow, and they took it. That evening the poltergeist, the switcher-on of lights and conjuror with ashtrays, was absent. The house lay mute. She hesitated a moment at bedtime before the Valium bottle; then, to be on the safe side, took her usual; and swam into a deep snowy sleep where a lodge (was it?) and men in fur hats, and the galloping…and something about…

I have a dream. She’s in an attic room with someone else, hands in her skirt and that dove sound caught in her throat that I thought was ours. She’s with him now, she bends into his kiss – and when she slows his hand, they swarm like bees, a honeyslick, an aftergloss of meadow; easy and damp, though not without a trace of venom, they are pure as animals and selfless, like the rhythm in the heat that, now and then, mistakes itself for hunger; and blessed, strung like pearls on molten wire, to bell and cry beneath a hunting moon, they come together; live; unwarranted; a braid in every touch, a flame for longing

in the plain speech of desire.

3 the edges of leaves must be examined through microscopes in order to see the stains made by dying flies at the other end of the tube is a woman bathing her husband and a box of newspapers covered with handwriting when an angel writes the word tobacco across the sky the sea becomes covered with patches of dandruff the trunks of trees bust open to release streams of milk little girls stick photographs of genitals to the windows of their homes prayerbooks in churches open themselves at the death service and virgins cover their parents' beds with tealeaves there is an extraordinary epidemic of tuberculosis in yorkshire where medical dictionaries are banned from public libraries and salt turns a pale violet colour every day at seven o'clock when the hearts of troubadours unfold like soaked mattresses when the leaven of the gruesome slum-visitors and the wings of private airplanes look like shoeleather shoeleather on which pentagrams have been drawn shoeleather covered with vomitings of hedgehogs shoeleather used for decorating wedding-cakes and the gums of queens like glass marbles queens whose wrists are chained to the walls of houses and whose fingernails are covered with little drawings of flowers we rejoice to receive the blessing of criminals and we illuminate the roofs of convents when they are hung we look through a telescope on which the lord's prayer has been written and we see an old woman making a scarecrow on a mountain near a village in the middle of spain we see an elephant killing a stag-beetle by letting hot tears fall onto the small of its back we see a large cocoa-tin full of shapeless lumps of wax there is a horrible dentist walking out of a ship's funnel and leaving behind him footsteps which make noises on account of his accent he was discharged from the sanatorium and sent to examine the methods of cannibals so that wreaths of passion-flowers were floating in the darkness giving terrible illnesses to the possessors of pistols so that large quantities of rats disguised as pigeons were sold to various customers from neighbouring towns who were adepts at painting gothic letters on screens and at tying up parcels with pieces of grass we told them to cut off the buttons on their trousers but they swore in our faces and took off their shoes whereupon the whole place was stifled with vast clouds of smoke and with theatres and eggshells and droppings of eagles and the drums of the hospitals were broken like glass and glass were the faces in the last looking-glass.

Love's not the way to treat a friend. There are so many better things for you than to see your feelings sold as magic lanterns to somebody whose body casts no light.

Owls hushing the floating woods Frail on my ear against the dream Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed, That rose slowly towards me, watching.

To live in Wales is to be conscious At dusk of the spilled blood That went into the making of the wild sky, Dyeing the immaculate rivers In all their courses. It is to be aware, Above the noisy tractor And hum of the machine Of strife in the strung woods, Vibrant with sped arrows. You cannot live in the present, At least not in Wales. There is the language for instance, The soft consonants Strange to the ear. There are cries in the dark at night As owls answer the moon, And thick ambush of shadows, Hushed at the fields’ corners. There is no present in Wales, And no future; There is only the past, Brittle with relics, Wind-bitten towers and castles With sham ghosts; Mouldering quarries and mines; And an impotent people, Sick with inbreeding, Worrying the carcase of an old song.

Sometimes, a very rare formula pearls in their nacreous throat, and right away you have an ornament.

the swans drown in bilge water, take down the signs, test the poisons, barricade the cow from the bull, the peony from the sun, take the lavender kisses from my night, put the symphonies out on the streets like beggars, get the nails ready, flog the backs of the saints, stun frogs and mice for the cat, burn the enthralling paintings, piss on the dawn, my love is dead.

(Trans: Mary Ann Caws)