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al-Chwm

amlwch: n.abundance; also, a small town
on the north-east of Ynys Môn

        1

The place I grew up is called abundance.
My not knowing Welsh
was not knowing this,
flowering in adulthood
one side of a fissure.
Circumstance and time
are two thieves shaking with laughter
but in other spheres I trudge
toward responsibility
for truths and lies in language,
sitting on the verge
at times with my bags.
This is written in the wind:
why not here?

        2

Half a century of cataracts
over round stones that were eyes
to heaven, of water chuckling
minutely through stained brickwork
and I emerge into al-Chwm
with a sudden jolt of trust
with the relief you feel when you explode
out of a tunnel in the Underground
to a crash of leaves and speed and light,
the roar’s end.    Then a quiet animal
homecoming.  

 

       3

 al-Chwm is an inversion
of fulfilment and language,
mindful of children
growing up displaced
with their years not rightly focused,
and those for whom
the simple is at first too obvious,
who can only ride a bike
with a partner looping up and down
on the other pedal, on a steep hill
with a bend at the bottom,
and there’s traffic.

It comes from an inability
to look abundance straight in the eye.    

        4

al-Chwm’s a town on a concealed point
that comes to you when you’re ready,
when the mist lifts, stripped of its poison,

a town that strains at the leash
that slips out of my hand.

 

  Entering al-Chwm

It began and ended with the barking of tethered dogs,
a hundred street lights for the non-existent carouser,
nobody up who was up to any good
but nobody was up,
footfalls exaggeratedly soft in the house,
the fridge appearing to boil defiantly
in its limelight,
ordinary things reversed
in a town like any other
that had never slept, nor ever would.

A man carries the place he comes from
on his back as he unravels,
it is transformed with every step as he is.
Others in his peripheral vision
shift their shape, but it is always he
who is running through a defence
with a mazy run that slows
and the game ratchets up to a blur
of speed and wonder, the tackles come
in a series of thuds within him
and he is on his own,
the commentator faded to their mutual relief,
and the judgement:
he was meant to pass the ball but didn’t.

He is reconstructed as he diminishes
by schoolmates he hardly remembers
who have carried him forty years without noticing,
by the milk of human interference,
and he carries their vowels for them
that jostle for his attention in gatherings.
Friends wrote a different essay
when they were eleven
and collide a second time
in the same time and place,
their electrons and neutrons
arranged for a different party.

He drifts, not noticing
the decisive moments under his feet.
The town he turns in to is al-Chwm
with his pancake stack of faces
that consolidate to the one book
with its pages of flour and disappointment,
dried milk and prevailing smile
collapsed into each other,
with his waiter’s tree of dishes
for the approval of the town he’s made
that will come out to meet him.
Many meals, many traces, but the dogs
bark for each other, not for him.

This is al-Chwm, they say:
it is permitted to drop unnecessary loads.
There are memories he will declare
nothing to declare, green channel
and there will be nothing we can do.
It appears that what happens is allowed.
He finds the people of al-Chwm
wear mirrors on their clothes,
their currency is uncertainty,
their traditions rich
but indistinct.

Their monuments leave much
to an imagination shaped
carelessly by weather and time,
preserved for a minute that lasts.
Their songs resonate in the memory
as in a dome - it’s acoustic
rather than detail they celebrate
though there are fragments
strangers recognise,
and those they bring -
it’s not clear which.

Those who seek refuge here are safe:
the code for acceptance is a capacity
to raise one eyebrow
and they have joined you, or you them.
Thus a concern for justice is unknown
which brings much relief,
and al-Chwm is immaterial to the Fall
which fell past it, unobserved.
The parallel has replaced the afterlife.

From Steve Griffiths’ Entering Al-Chwm (first extract published in Poetry Wales 39/3)