Island of Lightning (15 page)

Now I am neither one side of the border nor the other but amidst the border, the river on my skin, the water deeper, deeper as to be dangerous, befitting a border place. Fifty yards from shore the river is steeply banked and care is needed to withstand the wrestler, oiled and devious, that the current has become. The twelve knights could have grasped each others' arms and made a bridge across the water. The wrestler would not have troubled them. But they never crossed. They did not seek change or a country without grapes and honey. In the banks I see tree roots, gnarled as the river name, holding up the ramparts of sand and keeping everything together. And there is a stratum of plastics from BOC and ICI, and children's plastic toys and plastic shoes and ganglions of plasticated rope, as if possessions had been abandoned at the boundary, having no further relevance, such was the change that would occur after the crossing.

Change. That miracle. Destroyer of the inert. The American jet now overhead, the cormorant's skid from the skerry. All bringing change. The twelve knights understood it, their bones not much farther down than the Nike trainer and Datsun Sunny impacted in the bank, or the rhizomes of tetrapak already under the surface of the sand. They were wary of these waters and stayed with what they understood. The river is slower now and more intricate. It is deeper than it looks. Beware, traveller, when you cross here, as one day you must. Glancing around you will see cranes against the sky, and venting flames, the iron dice of industry rolled upon the plain. When you breathe you will scent steel, acrid of late but sometimes delicate as the smell of cardamom and limes. Yes beware when you cross. There will be nothing to hold on to but yourself.

I'm Telling You Now

1.

The establishment is called ‘Keats'. There's karaoke tonight and a slam next week. I order a JD and watch the bartender pour it to the tumbler brim. He gives me the once over but my hand's rocksteady.

And in that lunchtime bar I open the
New York Times
to learn that Freddie Garrity has died of emphysema. Another Sixties' relic killed by smoke. But sixty-nine's a long life in the music business. Not that Freddie was a star. On
Top of the Pops
he seemed a comedian, and in the US the biggest hit for Freddie and the Dreamers was that ludicrous shuffle, ‘Do the Freddie
'
. I preferred
‘
You Were Made for Me
'
, a Mancunian shanty you might imagine echoing round those redbrick Wilson's pubs with their brass nippled beer engines and typewriter tills.

Next I slip the stone out of my pocket. It's small and greyish red and fits my palm. One surface seems flat enough so I take the tweezers and scrape a letter. Then a second and soon I have my four letters cut. Holding it to my face I breathe in the stone's perfume. Then I unfold a sheet of paper. There are one hundred and thirty-six words on it. They include
ddodo
and
teli
. That'll fox 'em. The words make a poem about a time-travelling poet who died fifteen hundred years ago but is still flying around the world. At the moment he's in the Middle East. Yes, these are my materials: detonator and high explosive. See how the claquers like these babies. And I think, at the counter in Keats, the lunch-hour crowd starting to ebb, how easy it is to make a bomb.

2.

Moab might be Lot's grandson and massive ordnance air blast but tonight it's the mother of all burgers. Yet soon that neon charcuterie is left behind as we climb to Chapel Road and in the Datsun start to crawl round the hacienda.

Headlamps off, we're a black car in unpolluted darkness. The house too is unlit. The gates are closed and there's no guard.

But then, who is that? Up there in the tower? A figure is gazing, skywards of course, ever skyward, the telescope barrel pointing north east. So I look with it.

Hey, where did these come from? Such raw constellations: the Cactus, the Cadillac, the Tequila Worm. I've never seen them before.

Got to be Cage himself, hisses my companion. Built the house specially, didn't he? For the sky. The empty sky.

So while Nicolas Cage is scoping the sky we're stalking the stars. Yeah, Nick Cage. I think of him in
Leaving Las Vegas
, tipping that quart into himself like it was mother's milk. As if he was filled with ashes and he opened his mouth to a cloudburst. Call it irrigation. Then another Nick Cage in
8mm
, one man against the snuff-movie industry. On the side of life. The good guy.

Okay, maybe in reality he's not so great. Those sad tattoos? But you have to have a model, see. A role model. And Nicolas Cage is mine. Because Cage built an observatory. And now he's up there looking at all this; the fireflies, the UFOs, the shakedown of meteors over the desert. I can picture that glass he brandishes. Black lens with a rainwater meniscus set in a gold bezel.

So I'm here too, sneaking round his villa, me and the other obsessives in the pinon pine and prickly pear, all of us an audience outside his theatre. Because where else should we be, tell me that, when rising from the rimrock is this midnight moss of mescal-coloured stars?

3.

The stone comes from Cog y Brain. What's up there? A cool calcareous crater. A view of Gower and Cefn Bryn's brown volcanic cone. X-rays of coral. Buzzard bones like 64 ounce Big Gulp drinking straws. And from my botanist's roster, restharrow and bugloss, squill and squinancy. How did orchids, those stoics of limestone and loam, find their way? Why is centaury, the alchemists' herb, common this year? Below, every branch in Cwm y Gaer is a cambrel for cuckoo and crow. Ash keys shiver in their sheaves. A cock pheasant does the Freddie through the buckthorn. Not a bad place. Yet it will take me until the next millennium to understand it.

But scrape any rock on Cog y Brain. That's
brine
, and it was. The summit was once an ocean. This was the seafloor and its saltwater blood-warm. Tsunamis spun their camshafts here. Yes, select a stone and carve a word. Antediluvian viruses will be released, sulphur foam in the nose. The stones on that crest are brittle and fragrant. They snap like capsules and their dust floats away.

4.

Talking of role models, here's another. In the Guggenheim Museum's helter-skelter, it's the last day of the David Smith retrospective. Smith was a Brooklyn sculptor who taught, escaped teaching, worked like a foundryman to weld together his immense metal statements, drank too much and at 59 wrecked his car, cutting short a unique career.

In his steelies and leather apron, there's David Smith in the long grass of Bolton Landing. That's where he found sanctuary and inspiration. But a model? Undoubtedly. A big fisted shambling loner, Smith got on with the job. Sipping Jack Daniel's, brandishing his acetylene lance amongst a bushel of sparks, Smith dealt in wheels and axles and the dynamics of frozen motion.

In photographs he looks a bashful frontiersman. But that's what such people are. The USA is full of them. They make their art in the wilderness – in Gila Bend where it's hot as a griddle; amongst the redwoods in Santa Cruz; on the iron-angled sidewalk between Burritoville and the Café Vivaldi.

The caliphate that runs the Guggenheim has brought David Smith's art together. Here's the stuff that was weathering in the fields, all bloodrich iron, the portals and girders and gallows Smith set in his meadow.

But here too are his drawings. If Smith was a bison he's also a hummingbird. Every year he made four hundred large drawings. Let's forget talent for a moment. Industry, dedication, resolution are his other lessons.

But this might be his masterpiece. Here are David Smith's
Medals of Dishonor
, his predictions of the Second World War and what it would bring. The artist took a dentist's drill to incise bronze with some of the twentieth century's greatest war-warning art. His images are an indictment and iconisation of war and what creates warfare. Smith used horror derived from Hieronymus Bosch and satire from Brueghel the Younger to forge terrifying tableaux.

Looking at David Smith's work, displayed on every floor of the Museum Mile ziggurat, a ray passed through me. A dark laser. Maybe it had nothing to do with the exhibition. It concerned a human being's comprehension of how it must live, and then the struggle to fulfil that quest.

Not everyone rates David Smith. And maybe his art never made him happy. But there he is in dungarees that oxy's burned with its bulletholes. Dangerous stuff, oxy-acetylene. I worked with oxy once on the Cardiff foreshore when the scrappies from Bird Brothers were taking apart the hulk of
The Flying Fox.
The flame can droop loose and yellow. But at its hottest it's invisible.

5.

We go through the scanning process and file into the United Nations. With the other writers I put my stone on the auditorium stage. This rubble drawn from all over the world will be used in a ‘poetry wall'. We were instructed to incise our language's word for ‘poem' on our stones. As I know that English is not required, I have scratched a shaky GAIR. Which in Welsh means
word
. Because a stone isn't a poem. A stone is a word. So
gair
it is.

Then I read the poem I have selected. What can destroy might better delight, so nerve gas or nougat, bomb or bergamot, here are one hundred and thirty-six words about Taliesin, war poet who celebrated and surely detested war, who in these new words is stating fundamental truths. Which we will ignore.

When I cut the stone a prehistoric wind blew out of it. In Keats, I cupped its sulphur-smelling spore to my face. Like Monsieur Becquerel in his laboratory in Paris, Becquerel who had returned from holiday to discover radioactivity, I held the stone and let its demon enter where it would.

Freddie and the Dreamers Greatest Hits,(EMI) 1998.

‘Taliesin' by Emyr Lewis, from Chwarae Mig (Barddas) 1995. See
www.davidsmiththeestate.org

The Reef

i.m. Joan Abse

But, Lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake,

That seemen rather a foul confusion

Of werk than any fair creacion

The Franklin's Tale

In his fifties my father described himself as a beachcomber. I was puzzled by that until I reached the same age. Now I understand. My own writing is a beachcomber's diary whilst my editing work essentially beachcombing, with bottled messages of my own tossed into the electronic surf.

But literally (littorally?) I have become a beachcomber, discovering that the intertidal zone is the most dynamic part of the physical world I know, a world where I am closest to the processes that have fashioned this planet and the life upon it.

I'm in Southerndown on the coast of south Wales, where the sea snipes up the gwters to girn at the anglers on the bulwark and threaten night fishermen on Witch's Point. Twenty years ago I was employed here on the Glamorgan Heritage Coast as part of a Community Project
scheme
. I'll write that again –
scheme
– to bring back its unforgettable flavour. For
scheme
was a quintessential Thatcherite era word. And a bitter joke. (
Heritage
too is doublespeak.
Heritage
is the dirtiest deal we get).

But on the Heritage Coast I was the project manager. My colleagues were ex-soldiers and ex-prisoners, the workshy the feckless, the
didoreth
, the damaged, the dangerous, the doomed, the weird, the sick, the unlucky, the salt of the earth. And I was one of them, paid the pittance that rescued the unemployed from moral corrosion and social uselessness.

In the summer of 1984 I had gained my Post Graduate Certificate in Education, yet had learned enough of comprehensives to know I would not become a teacher. (What an irony: since that decision I have visited more schools than a sales rep for Dorling Kindersley.) Instead, I was coasting.

Now at Southerndown I watch the sand migrate. It's a restless beast. What was hidden is revealed. But the familiar is lost. There's the barbarous ironwork of a buried deck, chain-link and hawser indistinguishable from the rim of a barnacled pool. And here, a two metre high honeycomb that marine worms have built over the rocks. Golden, oozing salt, it hisses electrically as the tide retreats. But out to sea a mile away is a white stave that becomes a black line. Something is emerging. Soon it is unignorable.

And I stare although I know what it is and have known all my life. It's an island, almost volcanic in the way it appears so abruptly, an island extruding into daylight and already clinkered with mussel shells, black with wrack. Rearing there is a reef like the roof of a submerged citadel. What's appearing is a mezzanine for conger eels, its razored edges sharp as conger teeth.

Once I stood here at a cave mouth. The waterfall that screens it was frozen into a glacier three yards wide, corrugated like a corkscrew. From within, or so it seemed, peered the faces of drowning children, blind eyed and hair afloat in that strange aquarium. Above, the cliff was snow-thatched, finials smoking in the breeze.

But this is a hot day in July. Around me lie boulders shifted from their prehistoric positions by the Bristol Channel tsunami of the seventeenth century. South and west are the emersable region and the splash zone where geology is speeded up and I might feel geomorphology happen between my toes. This is where avalanche and earthquake occur twice daily. Twice daily the littoral is constructed afresh.

This Glamorgan hides a life all right, cold blooded, hermaphrodite, cannibalistic. Rather seek mercy in the seawater-coloured eye of a passing gull than a rock pool's sumptuous mantling.

Yet I love these pools, especially after a storm when a black and green thallus floats upon every surface. For each pool is different. One's a dark jeroboam; one a saucer like a stoop in a church porch. One pool I know is a limestone cylinder, six feet deep, two feet in diameter, an immersion chamber wine-coloured with coralweed, its red becoming purple and its purple black, a cistern the sun will never irradiate yet which to me is a doorway to inestimable regions.