Sequence Severn I-X
“O joy! Again the farms
appear;
Cool shade is there, and
rustic cheer:
There springs the brook
will guide us
down”.
Matthew Arnold,
Resignation.
Severn I
Morning’s dust,
the language is ordinary
and the music is missed
Where the note cuts
in vain - the pulse of a boy
is born into twilight’s
trust
Where the fates stuck,
and the sails of separation
wreaked a sad course.
...
Severn II
There is no escaping this.
The dark eventuality of Wales,
in its last regress,
beacons all walking disasters
and makes them wait.
But there is sanctuary in
pain.
Beneath our past
there lies a cruder prehistory
bursting the vein.
There is no escaping that.
...
Severn III
Once it was the music made me
wonder
what curious work within us
calls a pulsing dread
to order. Once it was the
colour of the dying
fire made me warm, now the
cooling water
forces down the face of my
detachment,
and blurs the foamy edges of
my vascular reality.
Now the burst of music bores
me senseless.
Now the work of silence stirs
my bones.
...
Severn IV
I occupy the vacant stretch
of mouth that fed the mental
sea
beneath all worrying waters;
I occupy the valleyed brow
what overlooked the sinking of
the sun in industrial winters.
I occupy the weathered faces
staring from suspension
bridges
waiting for the welcome sign.
I occupy the nameless
wretches,
falling asleep in the usual
places,
who washed up in the gutter
and were found dead
beside the river.
...
Severn V
Now I don’t know morning.
In my midday the moon
presides,
judging me like a missionary.
While a foreign sky is falling
and the fabric we share
collapses in tears
the flood arrives, like an
early warning.
And I am left splitting my
sides
to blinding tunes in the
coarsening rain
on the bank of an inkling tide
of blood
running out to a blackened
ocean.
...
Severn VI
The land that I avoided is my
secret
Wish to run aground against
the scarlet rock;
The hand that I evade was my
defeated
Will to be disowned by every
womaned sea.
The wind that overtakes me is
a woman
Song to drown the sounds of
dead white men;
The wounds that whip the sail
are my emotion
Wrung out on the decks of
harboured ills.
The comet that decides me is
regretting
Turning back our tale to face
the perfect sun;
The constellations burned into
my table
Tell the coming stars to force
their edges out.
...
Severn VII
It has never been my place,
Sliding further west into the
sea
of rising conversation and
calamity
To criticise the shore, the
certain
knowledge of the face, the
rocks -
The chiselled vanity of life
on this planet, this cycling
of water.
Or to censure the cause, the
unnatural
ebb of the moon and the tide
Against the shocks and starts
of being
alive - and becoming a body
In the end. It all goes back
to Thales -
I think. Therefore the river
Carries me effortlessly over
the border
separating sleep from city
life,
Slips into a stolid state of
permanence
and icily extinguishes my
race.
They say blood is thicker than
water,
but it has never been my
place.
...
Severn VIII
Our almost incredible
episodal dream
nears the final phases:
Resolution and crises
conspiring like the tide
concede and assert that
nothing will be grieved
in Wales but the memory,
the Unreliable Faculty,
caught like Alzheimer’s
between the infant rocks
of insensitive modernity
and the hardest place in
history.
On a clay bed of culture,
I have carved out your
identity:
Unimpressionable. Like water,
and infirm as the sea.
...
Severn IX
What do I know about life,
except
She pulses in my pointless
veins
and draws the fibres of my
muscles tight
in fear and despair at the
sight of herself
walking upright, and animated,
shrouded, and shimmering wet:
A being dipped in the crypt of
the world?
...
Severn X
First the banks.
Then the supermarkets burst.
Open the road - we must run
Leaving everything.
From the super-fluidity of the
heart
To the barren openness of the
brain.
We must run, like the river
I am bleeding on.
