Hope I can upload the pics I sent to my laptop... not the world's greatest techo when it comes to these fundamental skills. This is my framework; hope to etch a few cameo poems from this lot... unless the Lord spares me... or you, for that matter! A follow-on from Myth, Man... LOL K xx

PRIVATE VIEW


It was shut, your Boathouse, but, on pleading poetic licence, a woman in sunshine rubber gloves kindly showed me into your parlour. As a child she played with your daughter, she said, and what a nice family. Shame Llewelyn, your firstborn, had passed.

Like me (I discovered), Caitlin had apple cheeks, her profile portrait like wind in motion, a fair breeze from Ireland. Her forties make-do-and-mend homeliness spick-and-spanned the sitting room. But, gazing through rain-speckled glass into your timbered writing space, a scene of erratic moodiness matched the January open-mouthed estuary beyond its windows, sepia at low tide. A tweed jacket slunk unevenly over the back of a spindle-backed chair; meagre coals complained in the mealy grate; coloured bottles and inks scattered a sprawling still-life over an untidy desk. Everywhere lay strewn tight balls of unsatisfactory paper.

I savoured your flavour, its intensity in the pent energy still sealed within your shed and peeling from its walls alongside dog-eared, fading prints; could taste the fervour of your unseen concentrated gaze – frustration even – decorating like beads of sweat the furrows of your invisible brow or falling in unruly curling strands across your earnest features bent over the page.

Your language roots like my mother tongue: epithets like blooming barnacles crusting your cockleshell cottage, clinging to sea-wall shoulders now, as it did then; imagery lying languorous, reclined in clouds over Llareggub Hill; your verdant diction dripping in high-fat droplets from skinny-naked boughs, overflowing pails and puddles littering Laugharne streets, empty beneath Milk Wood. Your characters, now voiceless, sounding still like sleepless ghosts afloat in moon-pale houses or sunk dark beneath granite monuments, weightless and watching for wrecked waywardness through each bell-tolled hour of the day and night.

I stood at your graveside, my soles absorbing your bones. Beneath the simplest of white wooden crosses, you lie central in your story, inhabiting the lines you lived and created. Here your life’s pattern and texture repeats in breaths – year in, year out – yard upon yard of Welsh woven tapestry. And I, too, live childlike within my own lore, spun with living thread.

Your synapses still crackle like stealthy waters flooding fingers of surrounding saltmarsh purslane at high tide. Your voice bubbles centred in my being, like a source. The world recognises your public face but now I am familiar with your private view.