Read an Excerpt
Air Histories
By Christopher Meredith Poetry Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Christopher Meredith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78172-076-9
CHAPTER 1
Arrowhead
fire
unlock
ed the mou
ntain and rain
and wind brush
ed earth by to strip
to air what's reified
in stone, green double
wavelets in a piece of sea
jade flatfish swimming time
a hardening of fallen sky that
should whisper death or meat but
somehow can't becoming something
never meant in all the patient knapping
to perfected brittle symmetry strange midair
fingerprint stone cursor pointing to this hour
flint promise of our later fire that never
flew or sang till
now
Borderland
Ffin is the Welsh for border. It occurs inside diffiniad
which means definition, and in Capel y Ffin, a place
in the Black Mountains.
You'll find a ffin inside each definition.
We see what is when we see what it's not:
edges are where meanings happen.
On the black whaleback of this mountain
earth curves away so sky can start
to show a ffin's a kind of definition
where skylarks climb across earth's turn
to air and pulsing muscle turns to an artful
song the edge that lets a meaning happen.
Live rock can yield to mortared stone,
a city to a castle, then a shepherd's hut,
where ffin's contained inside a definition,
where the lithic turns into the human.
Here's where things fall together, not apart
at edges that let meanings happen.
And self here blurs into annihilation.
Larkfall, earthfall, skyfall, manfall each create
the ffin that is the place of definition
the edges where we see our meanings happen.
Trees on Castell Dinas
Stripped to their themes
the winter trees
are the sum of their seasons
bombbursts of filaments
in pulsing harmonics
enact their contentions in air
work into eyesight
with ogive writhing
invisible veins of the wind
solidify rhythms
into the pathways
of hunger for light
What earth thought
When wind blows to kill rain, earth
thinks warmer under sun and breathes
smoke. Grass squeezes out of stone,
walks under tree and over mountain.
Man walks with animals under moon.
Dog drinks lake. Child sucks woman.
Child sleeps with smell of milk and woman
who sings to call the seed from earth.
Man sings to beasts. Dog sings to moon.
They turn their hunger into breath.
They walk the belly of the mountain.
They hit the yellow fire from stone.
And what swells in grass, with stone
and stone they kill. The woman
burns seed under mountain.
They laugh it out from blackened earth.
They turn their hunger out of breath.
They sleep beneath the bitten moon.
The river's warm with yellow moon
swimming above the river stones.
They sing the songs of warmth, and breathe
the song of meat and fruits. The woman
knows that ice will bite the earth
and grass sleep again on mountain.
Black cloud will kill white, and mountain
float in lakes of rain. The moon
will die, and snow will say to earth:
whiten now and sleep. Push stones
out of your skin. And singing, the woman
will turn her hunger into breath
and a child may turn her breath
to not breath and the mountain
eat her and the singing woman
turn fear to white breath, but the moon
will stand in sky a dead stone
above hard lake and sleeping earth.
If woman's blood can sing to moon,
when wind's breath kills the rain on mountain
grass may walk again through stone and earth.
The record keepers
One thousand one hundred and thirty was the age of
Christ when there were four years in succession without
there being any history ...
– Brut y Tywysogyon/Chronicle of the Princes
That day, Brother Cynan in his magpie habit
stepped from the Scriptorium door.
Daniel and Owain paced by the pond
measured steps kicking at their gowns
and talked unheard.
Cynan threw crumbs to the sparrows,
rubbed his whiskery tonsure,
felt food easing through him, sighed
and looked back to the silent page.
Rain fell then didn't.
The wheel of the sky
did its diurnal turn, its equinoctial tilt.
He slept and woke,
stared back at Taurus's red eye.
The masses passed.
Was God asleep
or was this an awakening?
One day in a ripening barley field
Cynan watched the quietness of butterflies,
white and many mazing and dipping
to blooms among the stalks.
They wrote the history of air.
*
Consider. The edited highlight could also be
the bit where the wicketkeeper yawns
rubbing an eyelash from his face.
Or think of Watts's minotaur –
he could be waiting on those battlements
for the freight of virgins, but maybe not,
that crushed bird no symbol, just a slip.
Perhaps there's no more narrative
than watching sky.
*
Then, at the bottom of a sea
like a hell on a church wall
hagfish fattened on a rotting monster
blind jaws working.
Fished up, they oozed and rotted in the sun.
And then a monster battened on bad meat
and found it good, till
suddenly he stopped.
Some inconsequential picture
stayed on his dying retinas –
a cobweb in a corner, say,
as his brain shut down.
A courtier will have hesitated,
checked for breath, flicked at last
a finger at the still eye
(in the royal jelly the unseen image
of the cobweb shivers)
and hurried out.
So in the rigor mortis of a king
Process stiffened to event and story woke
and plot and consequence began again.
*
Brother Cynan in his magpie habit
took his knife and opened the Scriptorium door.
Somewhere in him till he died would be
an unheard talk, some sparrows on a path
small scriptless books that eddied in still air.
He said, The thing about the ineffable is –
and shrugged and pared the quill,
split the nib, and reached for ink.
Y grib
Enw'r Saeson ar y grib yw cefn y ddraig.
Addas i'r rhai sydd angen anghenfilod saff
mewn chwedlau dôf.
Ynom mae'r gwir anghenfil.
Edrychwch – ôl yr anadl llosg,
y cafnau hir lle bu'r crafangau.
Na. Llinell alaw ydyw
o graig
a phridd
ffiwg o rythmau
yn esgyn
a disgyn
ac esgyn
curiad ymdrech
a saib ac ymdrech
a saib
cymalau esgyrnog
y cefn
yn codi
mewn llif
nodiadau sy'n
newid eu lliw
dan lusgo'r
cymylau dros haul
esgyn i'r ffin
ar yr uwchdir hwnnw
sy'n brathu'r
awyr
a chyrraedd
y distawrwydd
ar ddiwedd
&nbs;y gâin
Ridge
In English it's the dragon's back, a name
for those who like their monsters
safely mythic, tame.
The real monster's here.
See where our burning breath has passed,
The places that the talons tear.
No. It's a line
of music
made in stone
and earth
repeated rising figure of
effort,
rest
and rest and effort
of vertebra like
an arpeggio
taking
colour
from those clouds that blow
across the sun
falling
and swelling
to where that edge
of upland
bites
the sky
goes home
resolves at last
to almost-silence in
&nbs;white noise of
living air
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Air Histories by Christopher Meredith. Copyright © 2013 Christopher Meredith. Excerpted by permission of Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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