Out of town, on the hill above, Aneirin Byron slams the shutters wide. Ty Bach, his tiny cell, his only rest, one room to sleep, one room to live. Another of the name, behind the byre, the strawbox, secret, one to visit. He breathes the morning like the vanishing mist. Inward air rustles papers on his wooden desk.
Here his late-night offerings to his muse, his waxed and waning words, scribble on the page, yet to be ordered, or pass from mumble to meaning, from meaning to wisdom, or rise into beauty, breathtaken beauty, a sigh on the tongue, a song.
Looking down, as Byron must, his keen imagination like angel wings carries him over the town. His mind’s eye traces street, lane and stairway, over roofs of slate and shingle, the baked pantile, the tinshack sheet, sad-wood rafters poking out beyond repair.
The poet, the bard, the Byron and his Aneirin will, fly like blackbacks over the streetmap town. Over the glistening harbour and the boyos mending, over the breakwater and the skerry, the rock and channel to Ynys Gwarchodwr. Across the swell to Daffi Point where the calm between the tideswell shows the run of Jones’s skiff. Straight and narrow, like the path to heaven, out among the cliff tops, straight to Dolli Teasmade and her welcome arms.
Aneirin Byron does not see. His romance is inward-looking, soul-searching, complicated. He renounced all simple things for things oblique. How else might he endure. His inner heart’s erratic beat, betrays a past entangled, memory obscured. Now in the long grey hours he slaves with pen and paper, cup and grog-pot, fantastic staring out the dim-night window, to write his fading recollections down.
Write as he will, as well he must, the words go on and on. There is no end. His sentence is this, his one unfolding sentence, letter, syllable and word never running out of page. Never till the end, which cannot come.
He sees in daylight, his cup half-full where night half-emptied it. His fluttering papers, themselves half-full of sense, half-scrawled scratches on the page, blown across the room. In his darker moments, unremembered now, he’d gather them, still reflecting how the words he needs come only half as true as truth should be.
© BH 2015
Just a fragment of fascination for Dylan Thomas. I pored over Google Maps of the Welsh coast for this. Despite the language borrowings there's a lot of Nor-East loon in there. The cadence is different. The poet in his painful solitude is always there.
No comments:
Post a Comment