Experience at Merthyr Mawr                                                         

                            For Peter Sedgwick

 

It was like a holiday from winter –

the dark clouds and the rain and fog we’d had

so much of through November and December,

and the start of the New Year as well – to be

out under that brilliant blue sky and sun,

climbing up and down the yellow sand-dunes

with nothing to block out the wide horizon.

Bright blue above, bright yellow underneath,

varied with green grass tufts and clumps of trees.

Even the air seemed dryer than it had done.

The going, so laborious in summer,

was firm. The sand, having seemingly absorbed

all the moisture the sky and lower air

could throw at it, was not even puddled.

 

We couldn’t get enough of all that brightness,

nor of talk either, hopping between topics

as we jumped from one side to the other

of paths, and shared our choices between ways

ahead of us on our route towards the beach,

the glorious wide yellow spread of it.

 

How many childhood memories of shingle

lie behind the sense of privilege

at seeing such an expanse quite deserted?

We walked across it to the lapping waves,

not minding when one of them sidled in

a little further than its predecessors

and touched our shoes as if to bid us welcome.

 

Turning round, we marvelled at a cabin

built of logs sheltering two old beach chairs,

under a crazy roof of woven branches

with beer cans and two empty bottles near it.

The faded colours of a child’s soft toy.

This was a place that must have been constructed

lovingly over many summer mornings

and left, unvandalized, enjoyed, respected.

 

Filled up with light and fresh air, and our blood

healthily circulating round our bodies

from all the walking and the ups and downs,

we climbed back more or less the way we’d come,

though not exactly, and this time found ourselves

passing a little stand of silver birches,

their white bark among shadows and black branches

making a brilliant answer to the sunlight

no cloud or mist threatened to diminish.

We saw two black cows on a ridge, a brown one

on another. We hadn’t noticed either

on our way out. Jackdaws sat at the tips

of silhouetted branches of tall beeches,

like full stops at the end of sentences.

We felt a silence here that was uncanny,

stood still and wordless to pay more attention.

Even the birds were quiet. No sound of wind,

only the singing of our own blood moving.

It seemed part eerie and part consecrated.

 

We pressed on, talking of stillnesses we’d known,

the quietude that comes in meditation

and the day you’d taken time-lapse photographs

thirty seconds apart, a minute, and then

two minutes, and in the interval you’d felt

a heightened sense of presence and of being.

 

We left the dunes behind, crossed the footbridge

over a stream into the little car-park

sheltered by pines all round and half concealing

the ruined walls of a Norman castle.

We stepped inside its roofless gloom, looked up

at the stonework of an ancient fireplace,

then took one path through undergrowth which led us

to a roped-up gate on to the single road,

retraced our steps, and found another path.

 

This was a whole new world, a different walk.

The path led through a wood. Ahead of us

we saw bright sunlit clouds of steam, not sure

what was mist and what was water, there was both,

a shallow river over yellow sand,

which was so spectacularly transparent

it seemed a metaphor of purity,

winding through a glade under the sunlight

which lit up dappled trunks and floating vapours.

It seemed an enchanted landscape. One tall tree,

hung evenly all over with bright pearls,

the hidden sun on drops of condensation,

was its epitome, its guarantor,

resting its case for an alleluia.

 

We spoke of how there is experience,

a continuum in which one thing merges

with another, and an experience, something

that has a shape, perhaps a goal, an endpoint,

a distinction made, you said, by Dewey.

We talked of the elusiveness of being,

how hard it is to fully realise

any moment, whether past or present,

the role of art in bringing definition

to an experience, like the camera lens

you show me which brings into focus

not just the one thing you direct it at

but everything. I thought of Edward Thomas,

beginning a poem with the joyful line,

‘The glory of the beauty of the morning’

and ending it with the more regretful,

‘I cannot bite the day to its core.’ Perhaps

in writing the poem he came closer to it.

I wondered if Dewey had read the lines

about experience without the an

just before that last line I’d remembered: ‘how

dreary swift, with nought to travel to, is time.’

 

As we faced each other in the car park,

you said, we have had an experience.

We have, we have, I responded gladly,

knowing that I’d felt all this flow through me,

round me, past me, ungraspable, wonderful.

There would be the photographs you’ve taken.

And tomorrow morning I would write this.

 

John Freeman’s poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. His most recent full collection is Plato’s Peach (Worple Press). His most recent book is a collaboration with photographer Chris Humphrey, Visions of Llandaff. Born in Essex, he grew up in South London and spent three years in Yorkshire before moving to Wales, where he taught for many years at Cardiff University. He lives in the Vale of Glamorgan.