I kept to the bell tower of Portmeirion,
which rose from the top of stone cliffs.
He rode across the Dwyryd Estuary,
his horse’s hooves sent up sprays of sand.
I trusted the stones beneath me, salvaged
from castle ruins. The tower clock stilled.
He was a blonde god on a gold horse,
and all he wanted was to enter me.
It was a pause in the transience of things,
a moment held in a glass bubble, the sky
one shade of blue, his eyes another,
his eyes translucent, tinted gray,
a god of silver and gold on horseback.
It was a bit of ancient punctuation,
our breath held, our hearts unsettled.
Salt stirred in waters between river
and sea, across the flatlands where he rode.
Come winter, the water and sky caught
their colors from his eyes, and I was gone.
Must I grieve it all again at a great distance?
Broken glass, held breath, unsettled hearts.
Splintering Light is a poem created in the Mythology Salon of Rebecca Smolen. https://www.meetup.com/Portland-Ars-Poetica/ We are currently working with Celtic myths. She provides the name of a god or goddess a week in advance. Trained as a librarian, I immediately go into research mode. My notes go into my little red notebook and into the recesses of my brain. On the day we meet, she adds a link to a poem that brings out some facet of the god. If I’m lucky, it’s posted before I go for my morning shower. Many poems begin during the time I am rinsing off the previous day’s detritus. Then I come to the Zoom meeting with a beginning or an ending. Or with the background she provides, I start from scratch.
With Eochiad, a god of the sun and horses, I had beginning lines which actually became the fourth stanza. I never did use It was the horse I feared. To touch it was to burn. Then the setting arrived, the fantastical Portmeirion in Wales. Just before our Zoom meeting, I watched some youtube videos about Portmeirion to bring back images of a place I visited once, over twenty-five years ago, after a six weeks internship at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The idea of the memory in a bubble arrived as I was writing with the group. Its source may have been the phrases I cribbed from the poem Rebecca provided, “Champagne” by Laura Kasischke https://poets.org/poem/champagne: A glass bubble as a means to pause in the transience of things and as a way to preserve a bit of ancient punctuation.
In this case, given the passives in my initial lines, I thought I would apply the constraint of writing only in passive verbs aka verbs of being. That soon went by the wayside. As I worked, the couplets got moved around. It amazes me how some poems are almost finished by the end of the two hour meeting.
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