To birth our first tongue

we plunge into the music

of those who speak to us

and around us, cradle

to kitchen table, make sense

out of our nonsense replies

to their words, fine-tune

our ear and mind with chatter,

books and blackboard lessons,

live the language in landscapes

of playground, city, country

and nature, till world and words

become our own music

without our thinking of it

To earn a second language needs

more than paper learning

from dictionary and grammar book,

which can only give us

Mae’r haul yn disgleirio,

‘The sun is shining’,

Not Mae’r haul yn gwenu,

‘The sun is smiling’,

the native speaker’s lifetime

of intimate rhythms

in landscape and breath

Harder still to express two worlds

of adoption and heritage

in picture or story when the words

and melody of one are lost,

or fragmented, or withheld,

snatches, glimpses, hints only

to help us reconstruct

Ngawak walang, back-stone,

from the phrase itself, not

from the lived learning

of landscape and speaker—

back of the stone, behind the stone,

a stone to rest the back

Leaving us the only burden:

to make sense of more than

stolen histories, faded music

by quickening with tools

of haunted eye, ear and mind

a death-right anthem that rouses

and haloes all our worlds

After Louise Glück

At a certain hour today, I learned of allision.

Obsolete now, fixed to maritime law:

one ship runs upon another

resisting the blurred tread of the ocean.

Even against progression, the act is accurate;

yielding: a feint straight line.

Along this seamless form runs the current of

a somatic physics,

as though the event of interaction between two objects

finds gratifying the lock of their forces.

Whatever is produced is in excess,

a residue seen without feeling.

We could not defend a lack of movement if we tried—

such stillness, so well-timed

not even late, really quite early?

Why should we be made to remember

the instant our data dissatisfies.

The act of alliding; of impact, striking the static.

It disturbs the mercury coming to rest against our faces.

It takes energy to misalign.

none inured to it

is i guess the rub

language splittles the length of the pole

(i’ll have to ask you here to collect, all of it

, your working knowledge of satellites

and electro magnet theory)

that           it           formalises

and familiarises. that the diaspora

felters over the surface area

fractions (out) like a shock absorber

and puts the arm and arms length

between, between  ,

it is, what? the way of things?

like a current model suggests you imagine

most matter is, when you get right down to it

empty space, pursed points

blowing against each other.

diamonds are forever (1971)

a lattice with fixed quantities, like

the word “immediate” has four syllables

. it would probably be impossible

to trick the whole immaculate

conception of language

to congeal in the middle

(wherein together/s we

can touch

consequences)

Slick bubble of stone

suspended in a twist

of silver wire; pale green

(like hellebore flowers,

like sea-glass)

it holds pockets of time

within itself –

the sand melting crumbs of stone quartz
calcite feldspar becoming slack and liquid
frothing into irregularities of green glass
like spilled beads like water spasming
in a hot pan coming together in a sudden                     SHRIEKING
brightness

like flies

bumping the panes

of amber windows –

the tarmac melting the epithelium the fat
the bones shadows on the walls the smell
of the eyes melting the hands melting the
sky a sudden bright

SILENCE

that leak into the water,

into your children’s teeth,

their soft, forming bones.

The ground has changed beyond claim of classification –

clay or sand or silt, percentage between. This is something else,

ash-dark as tannins in water, salt-lake still. The photographic negative

of another place, another day, tree trunks skeletal in flood-plain

light, all light, all liquid –       Branches hold back the dry weight of sky,

propped between bare earth and cloud-burden. Know this is

not barren. It takes to learn its colours, and takes away – not fragile

but pushing back at the event, all impulse, resisting force.

That instinct: map damage and explain, excuse. A burn-off, out

of control. Boards peeling at the corners, hangdog,

dates shadowed in red: the universal sign of fire

or the colour walking under our fingernails,

countered in the lurid sensibility of new growth,

and the depth of white in every footprint.