The Physicians of Myddfai
for Mary Lloyd-Jones
At Llyn y Fan Fach
A crack in glass,
the scream and shadow
of a Hawk, close and low
enough to blow the heart.
*
Like a bowl of milk
the mountain cups the lake
where the Ages of Stone,
Bronze and Iron left their bones
under the earth, under the water
with the lake king’s daughter.
Every day he dreams her face
a ferment on the surface
at dawn as the sun casts
its net of light from the east.
With his mother’s bread
he’ll win her to his bed.
The spell is buttermilk and barm,
grains ground between stones,
pummelled and set to warm
by a wood-fire or under the sun.
Such leavening as suddenly she breaks
the waters of the lake.
Three loaves,
three chances for love
to cross the boundaries
of time and history,
of water and stone.
On the third day she is his own.
Three strikes of metal and she’s gone.
The ages drown,
dissolved into the past,
the story of the lake lies lost
in archaeology, the myths and silts
of ancient settlements.
*
Three sons were born of the union
of Stone Age and Celt, of stone and iron,
of earth-skills and art.
Their inheritance their father’s grief,
their mother’s way with herbs to bring relief
to body and heart.
Listening
What do the children say
when they’ve gazed into the story
playing itself in their hearts
in the quiet of the classroom,
in the quiet of a voice reading
and pages turning?
When the book is closed
they’re silent at the mystery of loss.
Then Joe says: It’s not twins.
It’s a girl and her reflection.
Bethan says: She’s the Stone Age.
He’s the Iron Age.
Emma says: The lake is death.
David says: The lake is the past.
Manon says: It’s true then.
Then they’re silent at the hurt of it.
Healing
Linctus, cordials, electuaries, quoils,
conserves of borage, bugloss and burdock,
scurvy grass, cowslip, wormwood, rue.
Bittersweet, heartsease, hemlock.
The sons of the sons of the sons
of the woman of water
and the man of the earth,
carried the art of healing
down the generations,
as if the human mind
were an amphora of precious oils
that must never be spilt.
History’s blurred with legend,
but the physicians’ names
are on the graves at Myddfai,
their secrets buried with their bones.
Their place a safe house
for wild and tame. The otter’s home,
black oil sleeking the night river
leaving its sprent on the stones.
From them we might have learned
the healing balm of plants.
Will this be the day they loose
the furious gene, trampling
the heal-all that grows secretly
in a field singing with bees,
that might have given us what science
seeks in its test-tubes and trays?
Seeing
She dips her brush in sky,
in rain, in mythology,
and comes up with who we are.
The brush unloads its cloud
in a jar to take its place
with stratocumulus,
a thunder-head to the south,
a trace of Western rose in cirrus
like pulled fleece on the Fan,
a front off the Atlantic
hitting high ground before
precipitation.
She paints with rain. A slab
of sunlight. A field dry-edged with walls.
All the colours of light.
Here at the lake, and later
in her schoolroom studio,
the paint-tubes’ poetry
is a remembered litany
of rose and purple madder, umber, crimson,
ochre and gold and cerulean blue,
Even white is a prism.
Even black is reached
through the rainbow’s narrowing tunnel.
Believing
A Stone Age hand in umber on a wall
gesturing with cave-beasts, symbols and script,
and the woman-sign, the vulva’s triangle,
the cup of blood, of pearl-seed.
Print of hoof, hand, paw, foot,
clawed, cloven, chiselled, calcified.
Suddenly we hear the heartbeat and breath
of a living beast, of a man,
or a woman calling from so long ago
we can believe she stood by tallow-light
to make her mark here on the cave’s page,
dipping her hand in blood.
*
November.
The wind is bitter
and the air is stone.
We throw bread on the water
for a wild swan near the shore,
paddling alone.