On the Beach at Aberystwyth

I woke up eyes opening

On the whole curved sweep of the bay

The grumbling old men

hadn’t written the books I wanted, leaving me Loose on a beach lapping out of sight In a spin too slow to be at a loss, to Fetch from underfoot what lost footing, A stock lump called babalwbi, Silurian drift of air wafer like the surf Turning lateral sibilants into chain alliteration, fossilised coral, fallen from the sea bulging with the likes of us, the boats the sheep, the words you soften at the start and slenderize at the end.

Space built up of passages that interconnect

but never go far, could we use that

for a littoral chain-stitch

not rich in roads and towns

where what stops in Skye

might start in Marrakesh? to abstract the maths

of an endless surface and no outside

that could reckon

Not the ocean

Checkless moving around one fluid northwest axis

But the concept of the ocean

The very wash of our geosophy

emergent glass with 360 panes and no centre.

Making headway through the Celtic archipelago

A boundless littoral

Unrolled like linen

where you are never any further away.

The mirror washing in shears twin planes of social laws

Of phoneme arrays

Spanish town names matched to Irish ones

Shimmering plane of beached wave drafting curves.

A cassocked figure leans from the pier

And shouts down

Distinctly, but in Welsh,

In the middle of this sea province

How we think of it is our choice

As a set of excellences recorded in strict verse

A line of hops between soft coves for coastal vessels

The movement of formal groups conducted by sound

Or the running of beef and hides down to arid Spain

A set of symbolic objects tied to real ones

for the purpose of exchange;

the way we go is what we find

a non-scalar map of references

pointing out of either side of my head

where my senses lie collecting:

suspend now the eastern investment and the French routes,

hang on to Tartessus

the monopole of the whole pastoral recession:

bales stamped with words in Punic business hand:

at St Malo

heathland grains, buckwheat made up into pancakes

the prevalence of cats by the fishermen’s dock:

out on the Western Approaches

waiting for the clouds to part

and show the conduct of the stars:

standing off from a Cornish promontory

the Cyclopean villages visible inland

stone jambs where timber is an import

the sheltered gully, green, down

to a porth with the fishing smacks drawn up:

at the mouth of the Ystwyth

wading through the surf shouting about a hot drink

falling along the predrawn lines of least distance.

Or, how was Spain before the Spaniards

Whether Pokorny was right about those Berber cattle breeds

Or come to that the Iberian verb system,

An eager sort of Bronze Age dog,

Or a kind of sheep used to travelling by boat.

a 3-dimensional meander

salt flake glistening

in curved inlet

drawn lax vacuity

bringing forth wealth

inmost healing loss

detritus whose environment is itself

wafer fluent

a skeletal tendril [the CORAL

pitted with permeations

backwash drifts

cellular vortex

recessively lapped

How much of the Atlantic

in each pore of coral? how much

of the oceanic culture strain

secured in me?

A scale pattern

Of a living sense dissolving at a glance

I jitter intent to hold the jitter thing holding me

my eye failing for want of cleats

on a skittering fish-scale surface

In the topos of borderless egoless states

Seized in a net and unseized.

The vacancies

but not clarified as posts, tied to individuals,

Social that same old riddle

Always starts in the middle structure

Where language flows through foramina

And runs in suspended circles

gently expanding

to amount to a family

But what I think is where I live

by the estuary calmly funnelling craft

from the outcomes of the Parisian Basin

And its weatherproof hangars of goods and ideas

For an hour each side of high tide.

Out here, populations don’t aggregate

They carry poems in their head

Packed in rules of assonance

A kind of enforced surplus of symmetry—

(This crossed the water sometime) —

Memorising the faces of hundreds of sheep

Consulting the neighbours and people like that for

Linguistic waves, slowing towards the western edge.

A ripple deflecting on with holes

(what's this? ethnicity as mispronunciations?

the border as

an awkward lump in the sound cone?)

Poetry in the absence of cities

Fused with kindreds

As the superindividual might.

From facts into grammar

A board

Within which space has callable rules

Of transit & contingency & address

The shingle addresses the whole question of proximity

Turning over and over

Too small-cut to possess memory

the smoothness of outward records contact time

its structure is all washed up.

The ocean uses fish to weigh down its catch of water,

Uses pebbles to count its pebbles.

I seize on the brilliant stones

and to break the surface of loss

throw them away again —

she threw me back into the ocean

at St Ives or nearby,

innovating,

and I swam with the fishes

cruising the domain of the soluble

and like a little bit of Avonian driftwood

I bob into shore here in Aberbabalwbi,

Like a gull skittering over a slate roof the

loss skittering over the sea, and The Matters keeping

in the National Library up on the hill—

head back to the values of icecream and sunshine

A little light rain

To bring the ocean to a scale we can handle

As a wash of loving forgiveness.

I am what I think,

The culture is what it says

The ocean starts where it ends