I made a casket for my soul, and it is a toy theatre filled with secret landscapes for me to inhabit.
—letter from Clive Hicks-Jenkins, 10 July 2015
I go small,
I go small,
You go small too
On the other lip of the great blue
Basin of the sea.
Because we can,
Because we know how,
Because we will meet
In the twilight blue of the toy theatre,
In the blue of the thorn trees,
In the blue of the blasted Welsh hillside
With its rickety houses
Tilted one way, another, yet another,
And its castle where you were once kept
In a room papered with poems,
Seven years, seven years
Like a boy or a girl
In a slow, blue fairy tale.
In the blue trees on a black ground,
We will raise our filmy moon tent
That catches every speck of floating light
And glows, as the bird glows
On the very tiptop of the finial
(It is Yeats, transformed into a silver
Bird that now and then lets out a sigh-note,
Or sings a river of notes that might almost be words),
While in the distance the stage curtain
Is a blue flood of river, folded, draped,
And deep with fish and secret river-holes
Where luminous river-maids
Dwell, all dangerous-dire—
They would kiss either one of us
And drag us down under the waves,
But we will not kiss,
We will not fish,
We will not stare at our own
Shattered reflections in the water
And be dragged like fishes of the air
Into the drowning deeps.
No, we will not drown,
We will not drink the flood,
We will not sleep
On the blue river-bottom:
We will picnic!
You asked for an apple pie,
And I have the apple pie to best all pies,
Made from famous Michael-pastry
He learned from his grandmother,
Half Mohawk, half French, a dab hand
(She died in her sleep with her handkerchief
Rolled into a ball in her hand),
And tucked inside are apples
That were lifted up to the moonlight,
Washed in moonlight,
Bowled across the grass in moonlight
By the lake called Glimmerglass,
By the very root of the Susquehanna River,
By the stump where my children
Once offered gifts to fairies,
Lake glass and bits of transfer ware,
Petals and flow blue and moss—
My pie apples are Calville Blanc d’Hiver,
Pale yellow flecked with October dots of red,
The Maiden Blush that grows in my back yard,
The Glimmerglass Pippin that grows on the shore,
The Morley’s Seedling, the Moon Apple,
An Ashmead’s Kernel, an Ard Cairn Russet,
A homely Pitmaston Pineapple,
Fragrance in a green hide.
You bring coarse-grained breads,
You bring cheese from Rhyl,
Red Leicester, Little Black Bomber,
Green Thunder—you bring
Welsh cheeses with names I cannot say,
Cheeses ripened in the Big Pit mine shaft,
With Welsh consonants and vowels
That tumble and are weirdly bumpy
In my mouth, on my tongue that is not silver,
You bring Carmarthenshire cheese,
Speckled with bits of seaweed,
Laver, littoral thalli
Harvested from rocks by the sea.
You bring the cheese, I the pie,
You bring a tent, I the Starlight Torch,
You bring Yeats as a singing bird,
I the Book of Moon.
We sit in the tent where we are safe
From the machinations of thorn trees,
Which rustle and talk of us, whispering
In voices we ignore except now and then
When we stop, staring at each other
Because it is not good to ignore the crackling
Noises the thorn trees make
When the wind gusts
And they shout at one another.
We sit in the tent where we are safe
From the Mari Lwyd, who goes on
Slipping beautifully between thorn trees,
The Mari flickering, flickering
As if hot like a homemade fire balloon
Whooshing up toward clouds
While children leap in a field,
The Mari flickering, flickering
As if made out of moon, all glow
And faraway coldness,
All romance and risk,
Mineral brightness
Set like a stone
Into a ring of dark.
We see the Mari Lwyd
Through the lifting and falling
Of the gauze of the tent,
A moving moon,
A traveller’s moon,
A weaving moon
Dipping and swerving
Between the thorn trees.
Some day we may ride away
On the back of the Mari Lwyd,
But that day is not this day,
That night is not this night.
We only ever have one ticket to ride
On the back of the Mari Lwyd,
And we are saving that ticket, that ride
For the end of a certain story,
For the arc of a moon’s course
Across the black sky.
This night we take out the treasure,
The Moon Book that has absorbed
All the light of the moon,
All the months of the world,
All the slow drops of blood of women,
And we read, passing the book
Back and forth. The words
River forth, cascading
Across the landscape of thorns,
Catching the Mari’s heels in a froth,
Making the Mari whicker and scream,
Making the thorn trees mutter and curse,
Carrying us away on their flood,
Though we sit all the hours
In the tent of gauze
While Yeats now and then sings
In the form of a silver bird
From the tall, aspiring finial
On an also-silver tent pole,
And the spill of river catches the tune
And pours out words, images,
Flinging them faster and faster,
Until there is nothing for it
But to dance, dance, dance,
And we dance our clumsy, homemade dance,
Jigging and wheeling, arms linked and unlinked,
Each twirling the other, tripping the other,
Sprawling, jumping up to dance some more,
Laughing, singing the words of the silver bird,
And the air around us flecked like an apple,
Flecked with silvery sequins of moon,
Swarming like a shower of fireflies,
Lifting us up into the air,
Pelting the darkness with light,
With words and with images,
Until the thorn trees are silver,
And the Starlight Torch
Is a fountain flooding with sparkles,
And our faces are silver like masks,
And the river runs through our hands,
And the words are silver on our tongues
(Now I can say all the consonants, all the vowels
Belonging to the intractably-syllabled, intractably-named
Cheeses of the red-dragon kingdom of Wales)
And the Mari neighs and flashes away, away
Lickety-split, lost, gone
Like a falling star into a bright dark
As we sing with unearthly voices
With the silver bird on the finial,
Singing of what was and what is to be
Until the thorn trees are lost in river,
And the fish (also silver) dance between the branches,
And the river is us and we the river,
And the sea is us and we the sea,
And the seven seas, us, and we the seven,
And the salt and the sweet are one
So that we are wonderfully lost, lost, lost
In the depths where Leviathan plays,
Where the luminous fish
Move slowly like barges,
Where the fountains of the deep
Begin—and one
Of us kicks the book shut,
Locks up the moon
And the river
Of words,
Images,
Joy.
Next time—next
I’ll meet you, you say,
By blue Tretower castle.
We’ll go small, I say,
By the castle where you were locked
In the room papered with words,
(Seven years, seven years
It takes to transform)
And we’ll slide the vertical hill
Into the whispering, into the land
Of the bitter thorn trees,
All crackle and threat,
Where the Mari
Swerves and sings
A song about fearsomeness,
A song about breathlessness,
A song about the Day of Doom
In a voice of molten silver—
You bring the bread and cheese,
The tent and the pole
And the singing bird,
I the pie
And the Starlight Torch
And the Book
Of Moon.
Marly Youmans is the award-winning author of thirteen books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent novels are A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage,Glimmerglass, and Maze of Blood. Her recent poetry books are The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press, 2011), The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, 2012), and the long post-apocalyptic adventure, Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing of Montreal, 2012.) This poem was inspired by a particularly fertile collaboration between the poet and the artist Clive Hicks Jenkins.
"Praise for Dark Movements Toy theatre" © 2015 Marly Youmans. This poem may not be reproduced in any form without the author's express written permission.