The Present Perennial
drawing by Sarah
Longlands
A constant dream of those who can no longer walk / is the running over level sands
As distance were itself a state unknown / the roads keep to the body of the plain
Denser than the shape / of the unknown town at nightfall / the tract of level road I travel on
Threshold, entablature, / unnamed to named, / sun to shadow
Growing fore-edge, / the roof of watery cities of swift-motioned flies; / the age is ours.
Forget, for a time, the edifice above / the crypt in which we are
The earth has a hollow sound / beneath the houses / and a dog barks in the mist.
The Isle The child’s metaphor, / a template to the later truths
Half-dark morning / light without an origin / no horizon to the day
Where is the weight / carried by a word?
The look of effort / above the stillest time / of room and note
Finer minds than mine / have wished the world were void / but for the thorn-tree on the heath
Upon the apprehension / of a distant form / borrowed nature / falls away
The ochre stream from the workings of the mines / still flows densely in the sough
In meaner times a dispossession / of what in greater time / would be freely given /-every path a day’s digression, / unreturning rhyme / at a pace undriven
Late unfolded hour / unknown before its opening, / and, at its opening, / no other time
The light strikes only one side / and the rest is shadow
Take the colour from the word / O mind in flight
Things are what they seem, / that’s not the point; / to grasp it is to own a fragmentary loss
Speed is everything; / no-one leaves the highway / but in a wreck of blood and steel / and the vanishing-point goes on and on
Each age is one syllable / in the pythia’s voice
1---- Looking down from where we are
2 ----No equation lacks an absence / to its poise
3 ----Control released / by an unknown hand / in the dead of night
4 ----Deep so deep within the frame of words / there is the silence of the hour
5 ----Reflex to the sight, the nude hill / from the flowing wood, the wren song / from the wall
6 ----Beneath this floor of beaten earth / there are floors of earth unnumbered
7 ----There is no certain memory / beyond dimensions of a day: / the way of distance is to resist sight / and turn it back upon the eye
The past is not a foreign dwelling place
You think you know emotion, / but you are surprised / by what is kept / behind the word
The unnamed hunger hangs behind the use of names
The roofs are rarely sighted, slate acres / of an institution
No memory of yesterday; / the day is gone. It passed without remark
I believe, but, in the acting of this truth, I have taken it / to be a play
Something arraigned itself before the eye, / every open sense was vigilant
May God help us, where we take entities / where there are none, and let the dark unspoken matter / move about us, and deform by weight our sight
A presence, other, in the darkness, / not unfamiliar, no, not to be so made out
Density of light, to speak of it / is to be upon the edge
Enquiry, the only possession / through the daylight
In the hiatus
of the night /
is the journey of the sleeping form
The sequence
Penrhos Garnedd and six other poems are presented here
clcik on the underlined titles