Prologue

Chris Neale

Prologue

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage red, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms


To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
in the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooing the woods' praise,
who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite
(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tongued puffball)
But animals thick as thieves
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogsback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms in a throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells
Of sheep and churches noise
Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone, and then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multitudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now. 

Dylan Thomas 

Convoluted, roping, twisting words - 

Dylan, you draw us in.

Seashaken house, starfish sands, men tackled with clouds, cities of nine day's night. 

 You live in a myth-world, a deeper-than-surface, marrow-life.

You dip in and out of this place, showing us what is there, bringing as much of it back to us

as words will carry. 

Your net of words has caught for us flashes of otherwise unimagined beauty.

Is this true? Is this place really where we live?

Is the poem an Ark to carry us there?

Is it enough to envision it?

I want to walk in the holy fields.

Summer Farm

Henry Mosler

Summer Farm 


Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass
The water in the horse-trough shines.
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.
A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.
I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me – as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.
Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

Norman McCaig 


“Threaded on time…” A pile of selves. Ha! Interesting. Also the idea of lifting a lid and looking down into the scene. Maybe we should be afraid of where our thoughts might take us! Or maybe we just need more practice at it.

Summer

Eero Järnefelt

Summer

Voluptuous in plenty, summer is

Neglectful of the earnest ones who've sought her.

She best resides with what she images:

Lakes windless with profound sun-shafted water;

Dense orchards in which high-grassed heat grows thick;

The one-lane country road where, on his knees,

A boy initials soft tar with a stick;

Slow creeks which bear flecked light through depths of trees.

And he alone is summer's who relents

In his poor enterprisings; who can sense,

In alleys petal-blown, the wealth of chance;

Or can, supine in a deep meadow, pass

Warm hours beneath a moving sky's expanse,

Chewing the sweetness form long stalks of grass.

Timothy Steele

from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

The line, "summer is neglectful of the earnest ones who've sought her." has given me some pause. Who would that be? Is it the gardeners and farmers to whom summer means the unfolding of their careful plans? Or the person to whom summer signifies the reaching of a goal? That word "sought" seems to infer pursuit. "She best resides with what she images." The word "Image" turned into a verb throws me off. Could it mean that she is in harmony with the one who simply takes in the scenes where she lives? She who is a fullness, an abundance, a generous outpouring, a flourishing, a multiplication, addition (Ha! Take that, Jay Parini, no subtraction here!), an expansion of everything - she smiles at our paltry plans, our miserly notions of Accomplishment, and flings her extravagance in our faces. Flowersflowersflowersleavesleavesleavesfruitfruitfruitfoodfoodfoodfoodand BeautyBeautyBeauty. What accomplishment is greater than this? Let's throw away our lesser goals. Let's lay down in a deep meadow and watch the parade of clouds. Let's be summer's children in her kingdom of bounty.

(And yes, I included this poem mainly because it's about lying down in the grass, one of the great pleasures of life. And here's another poem about it too,  "Silent Noon", by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.)