tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75747005453844167572024-03-08T02:38:50.703-08:00 HEAR TIME ECHO Byron BeynonThe Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7574700545384416757.post-4586495045477693722011-12-10T19:50:00.000-08:002011-12-10T20:14:51.043-08:00<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>THE GIRL IN THE YELLOW DRESS</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>for Sandra</strong></span><br />
<br />
A change in the weather<br />
like salt on ice.<br />
Eyes close and the day<br />
ticks away like sleep<br />
and half-remembered dreams.<br />
Threatening rattles,<br />
voices beneath lids,<br />
the wind is heavy<br />
against the walking figure.<br />
The girl in the yellow dress<br />
toes the water,<br />
her face is new<br />
and free of windows.<br />
She takes her age seriously<br />
but the silence is frightening<br />
like a lost rainbow.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>PERFECT PITCH</strong></span><br />
<br />
I'm reading the club manager's letter<br />
inside an intimate room<br />
overlooking a bay<br />
where colours change at a secret pace;<br />
he once shared a space<br />
with Dizzy Gillespie,<br />
a story of perfect pitch and smoke-<br />
filled notes, informing me of how<br />
the jazz trumpeter<br />
once listened to him shave, <br />
the almost-contact of his face<br />
in the cold mirror of light<br />
as he told him something real,<br />
shelled a musician's ear his way,<br />
towards the sound he'd never forget,<br />
that the electric razor<br />
held calmly in his right hand<br />
was in E flat.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>TINPLATE</strong></span><br />
<br />
This is the rain my father knew.<br />
My mother would see him to the door<br />
<br />
as he left for work<br />
at the tinplate plant.<br />
<br />
A worker for all seasons, <br />
his continental shift<br />
<br />
sounded like a dance,<br />
a geological movement<br />
<br />
over a quarter of a century;<br />
mornings, afternoons, nights,<br />
<br />
two of each as he'd wait<br />
for the one weekend holiday per month,<br />
<br />
the stop-fortnight of summer <br />
as July closed and August began. <br />
<br />
His coil of days, <br />
the overtime for extra pay<br />
<br />
inside a fork-lift truck.<br />
I still see and hear him leave,<br />
<br />
his uncomplaining silence<br />
I search as the tinplate shifts.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>HORSES IN THE RAIN</strong></span><br />
<br />
For long hours the horses have stood<br />
in the rain,<br />
in landscapes washed<br />
by a stained canvas of sky,<br />
quenched grass, a bruised green,<br />
they occupy a torso of field<br />
knowing the squall of the day will pass,<br />
the focus of their stare<br />
beyond hedges shaped by the wind;<br />
from the Bucephalus of history<br />
they sense ancestors at wars,<br />
loaded carts and carriages pulled<br />
through mud, <br />
a focus within art,<br />
the racing-reelers of cinema,<br />
each eye haunted by echoes of arid plains<br />
as the jewelled water exudes over them.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>HIS GHOST ON A HILL</strong></span><br />
<br />
The hardened ferns and plants<br />
join the face of my grandfather,<br />
a worker of black seams<br />
in the night.<br />
His years in a field of darkness<br />
scowl back at me,<br />
they rock the boat<br />
that moves on class,<br />
he is distanced <br />
by the burnt decades,<br />
opportunities he never knew<br />
behind that primary face<br />
which understood the order of survival,<br />
handed across the blisters of time.<br />
He once saw an orange moon<br />
eaten by the clouds,<br />
blue and grey were the scars<br />
on that face.<br />
He breathed the polluted air and lived<br />
to thread the veins of his children.<br />
His strength will not decay,<br />
he hangs his ghost on a hill<br />
overlooking the deep-seated sea.<br />
I keep him alive in his silent race. <br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>THE SPANISH STEPS, ROME</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>i.m. John Keats 1795 – 1821</strong></span><br />
<br />
The afternoon ends, <br />
an open bedroom window<br />
looks down at razor-dressed Italians,<br />
guide book tourists,<br />
a stall ablaze with flowers.<br />
The boat-shaped fountain by Pietro Bernini,<br />
aground near the Spanish Steps<br />
is broken and boarded.<br />
The calm insides of No.26<br />
Piazza di Spagna retain<br />
books of poetry, portraits, <br />
life and death masks,<br />
a letter from a President,<br />
the brief note signed by Thomas Hardy,<br />
each the formal remains of another age<br />
on display.<br />
The fireplace is like ice<br />
in these repaired rooms<br />
where the furniture was taken and burnt,<br />
the walls scraped.<br />
I stand in a small space<br />
where death entered at eleven o'clock,<br />
then leave by the staircase <br />
he painfully climbed. <br />
A life lived for poetry echoes and says<br />
“that which is creative must create itself.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>SENSES</strong></span><br />
<br />
Hear time echo across<br />
the width of a travelled sea.<br />
<br />
Touch the smooth stomach of a pebble<br />
as the river moves on like a symphony.<br />
<br />
See the rainbow disappear <br />
in a sky of bright promise.<br />
<br />
Taste the season of skin<br />
that waits on a bed of love.<br />
<br />
Scent the reason for a flower<br />
as an industry of words<br />
throb and scald<br />
the ripples of a page.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>AGROUND</strong></span><br />
<br />
The slick would engulf<br />
the conscious coastline into disorder,<br />
<br />
facing a wintry sea<br />
the estuary braced<br />
<br />
against nature's principles,<br />
the prescriptive balance threatened<br />
<br />
by a stench like genocide, <br />
the malevolence of human actions,<br />
<br />
mute dollops<br />
on a treasure of sands;<br />
<br />
the praised mythology of dolphins,<br />
the guillemots, cormorants, grey seals aground,<br />
<br />
their character despoiled<br />
on a torn signature of shore, <br />
<br />
a matted warrant,<br />
the covering tide their pall.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>VISIT TO FERN HILL</strong></span><br />
<br />
I walked there, <br />
following the road<br />
three miles or so<br />
out of Llansteffan's reach.<br />
That unhurried summer<br />
the tranquil Tywi flowed<br />
through high August country<br />
as the abundant sun made salt,<br />
soon the river disappeared from view,<br />
I was alone<br />
before a private house,<br />
where amongst the dark<br />
conifers and lattice of dizzy pylons<br />
a childhood world<br />
was one recalled.<br />
<br />
His words of celebration and praise<br />
brought me here, <br />
a boyhood recreated<br />
unaware that innocence<br />
would end;<br />
outside that day<br />
a sign warned<br />
Beware Guard Dogs<br />
In Operation,<br />
presented no clue<br />
to his untethered wordscape<br />
where a green fraction of fern<br />
was placed on the mindful page,<br />
an abiding calligraphy,<br />
nature's reading<br />
by the filigree of strong leaves.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong><span style="font-size: large;">WES MONTGOMERY PLAYED</span></strong><br />
<br />
Wes Montgomery played guitar<br />
without a pick,<br />
his thumb chose<br />
the one<br />
at the Turf bar<br />
with a single <br />
note that ran<br />
fresh with a form<br />
unique. <br />
<br />
His solo compressed<br />
chords moved<br />
along future passages<br />
with a lively melody<br />
tight with action,<br />
his self-taught fingers<br />
high on natural style.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>IN THE RAFFLES HOTEL</strong></span><br />
<br />
In the Raffles Hotel there are tiger<br />
prints on the floor.<br />
<br />
Reputation can often disappoint<br />
in this minty atmosphere.<br />
<br />
The sling is expensive,<br />
at the long bar there is beer<br />
and plenty of ice.<br />
<br />
Cool green of bamboo chairs,<br />
the Tiffin room and tea being served,<br />
as a woman wearing curlers<br />
sunbathes in the garden,<br />
drying her hair in the noisy<br />
Singapore heat.<br />
<br />
Haunts of dead writers<br />
and the readable past,<br />
names that drop<br />
from a case full<br />
to the brim,<br />
Kipling, Maughan,<br />
Coward and Conrad<br />
all stayed here<br />
with personalities,<br />
party-goers in fancy-dress,<br />
has-beens and 'I've forgotten his name',<br />
staring and smiling from<br />
numberless photographs<br />
their faces holding<br />
the pose and turning<br />
their minds to future keys.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>MOZART'S FINAL SUMMER 1791</strong></span><br />
<br />
The days are full of light;<br />
in Vienna Constanze gives<br />
birth to their sixth child<br />
as Mozart's final summer<br />
moves inside city walls<br />
with medieval streets.<br />
Tall buildings, <br />
the Danube, fields which burn,<br />
manuscripts, musicians, <br />
months of carriages vibrating<br />
on cobbled quadrangles,<br />
where sounds soared<br />
in the overworked mind<br />
with notes composed<br />
for the messenger<br />
who like an infant<br />
pulled at<br />
the hem of a travelling cloak.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>MISS AMELIA EARHART</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>the first woman pilot to fly the Atlantic 1928</strong></span><br />
<br />
Inside a century of premières<br />
a woman scans<br />
the weighty Atlantic;<br />
on course<br />
for the eventual<br />
touch-down<br />
in a Welsh harbour,<br />
her Friendship<br />
settled in June<br />
like a visitant,<br />
a celebrated debut<br />
on the current of the Burry Port waters,<br />
persistent wings,<br />
her senses alert<br />
to that urgent vision<br />
within time's deep equation.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>CARN INGLIS</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>The Hill of the Angels</strong></span><br />
<br />
The sound of pages<br />
from a book echo here;<br />
the climbed hill<br />
has the glow of an evening<br />
with delicate light<br />
circling the vessels of summer.<br />
The sun illuminates<br />
footprints and the dreams of memory<br />
view the taut breath of shared nights.<br />
Aware of fear and pain<br />
hunting birds unveil<br />
themselves <br />
inside an infinite breeze,<br />
shadows with history<br />
ascending to the skies,<br />
a massive rhythm shaped<br />
from seasons of sensuous ice.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>ART TREASURES</strong></span><br />
<br />
Into the secret silence of Manod<br />
quarry they deposited like Hamelin's children<br />
<br />
the National's collection of air-conditioned art,<br />
safeguarded for posterity inside a Welsh cavern<br />
<br />
to escape for five years<br />
the blitz of a city's acid heart.<br />
<br />
Impressionism in central Gwynedd,<br />
Rembrandt next to Ffestiniog's slate,<br />
<br />
sculpted to remember, not to be erased,<br />
the palettes of durable colour,<br />
<br />
an exact style entering the darkness<br />
brightening a craggy mouth in Wales.<br />
<br><br />
<br>The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com2