Island of Lightning (3 page)

Thus the Elvis Festival is an excuse for drinking. Exactly the same as international rugby. But it's more subtly done. Thursday and Friday drinking constitute exquisite preliminaries. The booze is to be savoured, indeed relished, each glass deliciously anticipated.

Saturday drinking on the other hand is relentless and singleminded. The drinker is not merely owed his drink. He deserves it like no other drink he will take. This Saturday drinker propels himself determinedly into the amnesiac twilight of Sunday morning. The wreckage of Saturday night is spectacular.

Sunday's drinking has a wistful quality. Despite the regularity of Sabbath sport, a tracing of guilt adheres to it. The toasts are wry yet congratulatory. We survived last night, they seem to say. Don't know how. Don't know why…

For the Elvis Festival, drinking continued into Monday. This was a shifty, apologetic drinking, for which the drinker asked himself, why am I doing this? I didn't know I was allowed.

And Tuesday drinking? This is the
terra incognita
of booze. Yet I saw two men with cans of Special Brew together on a bench at Trinity. It was 9.30 a.m. and they were ready for the world. They too felt Porthcawl and Elvis owed them a drink. Perhaps we did.

5.

Saturday night it rains torrentially. But I'm out with plenty of others, not all of whom are inebriates, looking for buses amongst unfamiliar fleets. We're soaked but there's a definite camaraderie.

What would Elvis have done? someone asks, joining a bus queue.

Get a taxi, comes a reply.

Before I go I pass the breakwater. Surely nobody would be rash enough to venture there? But yes, a hesitant figure has blundered on, looking for the right road.

He won't find it there. It's a dangerous place to walk, along a narrow stone pier where the lighthouse glows a spectral orange through its panes.

Better take care, Elvis, I say to the legions surrounding me. Better take care.

As to Katia, I've forgotten what she looks like. Yet I know I will see her again.

Infinity Speaker

Homage to Guillevic (1907-1997)

Avebury

The stars are running down the avenues of Avebury. I look through the stones at the comets and sphinx-faced Mars, at the cartoons of the constellations and all the familiar cosmic crowd. And together we gaze down the avenues of Avebury, seeking the energy stored in its cells, that battery that burns under the wheat and the wheat-coloured flints and the sunken coliseums of chalk.

Down these white roads I go, and think: do stones wait? Are these stones waiting? Perhaps for some summons from the ones they will recognise, and though weak as the brain's electricity, a fire will race between them.

But is Avebury waiting? Screwed into their sockets like grey light bulbs these stones are a religion abandoned by priests grown tired of waiting. So I listen to rooks, those cinders in the sunset, and the power lines above the Red Lion, crackling with our prayers.

Now here is January asleep under its webbing, an army dreaming of what it means to win a war.

At the stones it is soon midnight. This one I touch as if it was a child. How easily the frost's pixels vanish under my hand. For this next stone there's a formal embrace, but surely this next is already a lover, my tongue in the bell of its armpit, and I know the salt of it, the pulse, the stone's body ivoried in the lights of the A4.

And when I look, there is my skin upon Avebury's skin, my heart against Avebury's heart, and here is my thinking against Avebury's thinking and my snow upon the snow of Avebury, trodden to transparency. Six thousand Januaries of snow under my heels.

The four thousand at Carnac

Once again

what shall we do with you,

those of us who are able?

Upright in the sun,

proud of our labours,

always approaching a greater secret,

And you, our remorse

for not having gained it.
^*

A minute ago they were mine. Those footprints. A minute ago the cressbeds, a commotion of cormorants – augers of the tide. A minute ago those footprints were mine. On the quayside, on the river-riven stones those footprints leading up to me. Were mine. Leading to the quayside and the cress-beds. Those. Mine. A minute ago. Leading up to me. On the river-riven stones.

Modern poetry resembles a party in some overheated apartment. Everyone talks, nobody listens. Guillevic is invited but has not arrived. Or has he? Who is that then, looking out of the window? What's to see?

In a line of iron pines there's an oak. And a red squirrel. And there are
Les Geants de Kerzerho
, menhirs splintered by lightning, a little removed from the crowd.

We have forgotten the reasons for these four thousand stones. Perhaps they are a dance. An architecture. A language. But I wonder how we could have mislaid what seems now the most important knowledge in the world.

Appetite intervenes. I carry a tray of oysters through the town and serve them with lemon, a redflecked loaf and
cidre fermier
from Vergers de Kermabo, at a table where two rivers join.

Bloody stones, we splutter. Maybe they're an alphabet. Or telephone boxes.

Yet one thing's clear. They were important once and are more so now. Those stones. Grey as the barley under a megalithic sky. Yet my mind tracks back to the blackthorn born this morning.

Mwr

On the train they look like us. Sober in charcoal, plugged into Playstations. Or in their Izuzu Warriors on the Tonysguboriau sliproad, Bridge FM in the Infinity speakers.

But when they come home it's different. They hang their Samsungs on the sea-rocket and in the oystershells still used as mirrors they regard themselves. At last, the weekend. At last they can relax. And speak their own language.

These people are the neolithics. There are not many left but there were few to start. Rather short. A little stocky. So they blend in as they always have.

And that language? Highly endangered. In fact it's down to one word. That word is
mwr
. But don't ask what mwr means. Mwr might mean a million things. Breadcrumb sponge? That's mwr. Moon jelly? Mwr will do. Downsize? Throughput? Must be mwr. Because mwr is all these people need to build a life. To continue a civilisation. As to losing words, they're used to it.
Mws
and
mwth
?
Morkin
and
mormo
? They came and went. Words are mortal too.

But to me mwr was always a puzzle. I've heard the word for thirty years. And forgotten I hear it. So I thought I'd solve its mystery.

On a day without colour, fog like deadwhite pearls of arsenic, I asked the watchmen in the bonded warehouse, their backs to the brandies and the baldaquins, to the chalices turned from Brazilian bloodwood.

Their eyes were on their cards, then on the dealer, then scanning a screen where nothing moved. No-one murmured of mwr in that place. There were rottweilers that stood over thimbles of myrrh but of miracles there was no mind.

When I came out I looked at the water. Something was moving, maybe a wreck the current nudged. Yes maybe mwr was there. But I wandered back inland around the bends in Briton's Way.

I asked a man digging into a dunghill but he shook his head.

There's no such word, he muttered, and returned to the wall of mauve and cream he had exposed in the midden, cutting at that seam, his own misery sufficient, his blade faith enough.

In her driveway a woman was polishing a powerboat's nameplate and she laughed and said that she was a newcomer to the country and did not care for its murky corners.

In the schoolyard my old headmaster looked morose. Did we teach you nothing? he asked. Or is it so easy to forget? We murdered mwr, we made it meagre, a field, a ditch, a name too strange for the map, a morsel the surveyors spared, a moor behind locked doors.

He's wrong, I thought as I came away. The histories say nothing but I know there will be more to mwr tomorrow, that mwr is the mirror of a marvellous vale, an outpost, an outcrop, a forest, a fortress and on the atlas's last page mwr is a moraine with the moonlight's electroplate upon it, a city under the sand, a monument, a battlefield, an isthmus slim as an avocet's ankle, a reef, a rift, a rendezvous in the corner of the graveyard where the babies are buried with no-one to mourn and the graves are thrown open like music boxes where our names are played once and are gone.

Yes I guess that is mwr. Or Mwr. A muster of ghosts. But in the meantime I will go back to the sea, to what was moving there, and sit in The Marine on a corner stool amongst a gang of myrmidons sipping malt and we will muse on the merits of a single syllable and wager the wheres and whens of it and the homecoming we shall have.

^*
Translation of this poem from Guillevic's ‘Carnac' by Teo Savory, from ‘Selected Poems' Penguin (1974). See also Bloodaxe's ‘Selected Poems' of Guillevic (1999).

Old Man of the Willow

There's a knock on the door. Wes comes in with a box under his arm.

Thought you'd like to see this, he says.

Thanks, Wes.

This one's a beauty. Oh yes.

Seen one before, Wes. West of here.

Thought you'd like to see.

He's a beauty all right, I say.

Fourth time. No. Make it five.

But only roadkill.

Fifth time I caught this one.

On the highway, I say. Going down to Druid.

Yip. Five times.

Side of the road. I stopped and looked at it.

Had this box handy.

Coming out of some town up there.

Cardboard box.

Black and white. Like this one. Smaller though. Coming out of Dodsland it might have been.

Lost his wife, this one has.

And the ants were busy.

And his kits long gone. Caught him sweet as shelling peas. Fifth time.

You're the best, Wes.

Won't learn, see. Won't learn their lessons.

No road sense either.

Follow their bellies is what they do. Greedy SOBs.

Yeah. Seen one before, Wes. Maybe in Druid.

Reckon I'll drive him this time. Ten miles say. Drive him.

Good idea, Wes.

Yeah. Ten miles. Let him out in country.

Or could have been Super.

Wes puts down the box. It's a Monterey Jack cardboard box with the panels parted. I look in again.

It could eat its way out of there, says Wes.

Maybe, I say. But it knows the game's up.

Know what kills one?

What?

Fisher. Bites his nose. Flips him over and unzips his belly. I look again. This one understands. From his sett it regards the world with one black eye. The turning world. So many changes. Yes there it squats with muscles like velvet rippling under its spines. Its cowl of thorns. I look at its eye. The biggest blackest button from the button box. But it won't look at me. It turns its head. I'm too strange. It turns its head at the sight of my face. Turns round in the box like a dog in snow.

Thought you'd like to see.

Thanks, Wes.

And Wes puts the panels back and squats down beside the box, Wes with his liverspots, his ballcap that says Margaretville Bun & Cone.

Could have been Super, I say.

This time is the last time, sighs Wes.

He's a beauty.

Getting to be a habit.

A real beauty.

Course, says Wes standing up. I could get the axe.

The axe?

Well, yeah. You know. The axe.

I crouch down and open the panels and look at the quills, thick as drinking straws. They ripple as if the wind was blowing. A current in the corn.

Then I close the box and pick it up. I pass the box to Wes.

No, I say. Leave the axe. Take him up to Super, Wes. Take him back to Plenty.

The Key to Annie's Room

1.

It was an annexe stained by cigarette smoke. The furniture was one table and two chairs. There was a blackboard and a whitepainted Michelin X tyre cut in half attached to the wall. Within the tyre was a dartboard.

Behind the counter the landlord kept a set of three: plastic flights, dimpled brass alloy barrels. The whole room seemed to have been attacked by woodworm. Then suddenly it was league rules and game on.

2.

To live in Wales is to be conscious at dusk of the football results. We have created a country where sport is not only a healthy pastime but an obsession and a dread. Every media orifice releases an effluvium of prognostications and inquests.

Goal difference, try count, run chase bewitch the talk jockeys. Ataraxia? Didn't they play Wrexham once in the Inter-Toto Cup? And the results, a global tinnitus, are inescapable. Heard the score? someone asks. You'll never believe it.

You'd better believe it. Especially about rugby. If sport is a sickness, there is something malarial about rugby. Night sweats, daylight delirium, the tongue's anarchy. And every year the fever is deeper, its season more prolonged. I can say this as a player and a spectator. And increasingly as a sufferer.

Because today in Wales, rugby inflicts itself more profoundly on our lives than ever before. Sport in general and rugby in particular has crept up the pecking order of the television news. Only a decade ago, sport and the weather were the concluding items. Today they often lead.

What makes rugby ultimately absurd is the seriousness surrounding it: the training; the fitness ‘regimes', its work ethic. Scrum
machines
? Do they gouge, lift or talk back? Can they go to a nightclub?

Recently I watched the Ospreys-Toulouse game in the European Championship. The home team was led out by a seven foot shark in a duffle coat. The surrealism continued as the wind and rain roiled in the west. Quickly the players became Papuan mudmen. First they seemed comical, then inept. It was an important game but there was virtually no crowd. These were our heroes, at the peak of professionalism, coached, motivated, yet undone by a force seven over Mumbles Head. They might have been playing in a carwash. What did it all mean?