MORFA by Paul Evans
No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.
(Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House to his Lord Fairfax, 1631)
If you want to know about me, look carefully at me and I will tell you.
(Guidebook: Discover Harlech Castle, Cadw, Welsh Government, 2015)
Across the bay, the sunlight reflected on the windows of Abersoch. A flat-bottomed shoal of cumulus drifted in from the Irish Sea at about fifteen hundred feet, higher than the three jets that slewed above the bay like mallards high on god-like precision. The clouds snagged against mountaintops and the Land of the Eagle was lost in the mist of them. Bright windows far away: in spaces between clouds, the town shone back at the sea. The one so very bright; whose window was that? What was happening behind it? Two police officers opened a gate from the street, even though they could have easily stepped over it, and walked up a gravel path to a front door. A gull flew from a roof and the smell of the sea left their uniforms as the smiling left their faces to be replaced by something else. They pressed a doorbell. Bad news arrives like this. Meanwhile, in a red tee-shirt, hair tied up, listening to rock music on his phone, the beachnik sang quietly to himself and pulled on a length of polypropylene rope wrapped in seaweed. The more he pulled, the more knotted lumps of plastic things appeared, fetched up from the strandline. The beachnik tried to stuff them into a supermarket bag and a broken bucket he’d found. He waved an official salute and wandered off south, down the beach, against the grain of sand, the littoral drift, the traffic of clouds, the oceanic mysteries and the mirror-windows flashing terrible news from Abersoch far away.
Migration is the natural history of this coast: lunar tides & birds of passage come and go –storms erode roadworks, ash from pyres, fallout from wars that never end, purges, poison-smoke from the horizon (all making money) – to rest, finding comfort in estuarine mud, as do the white fragments of a slow-footed, sharpened idea: egrets (I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention) – gales to 47 knots run aground in the saltmarsh (of delicate abandon) and a bird disease (brought on the goose-stepping boots of wildfowlers) returns every few years, sometimes between the generations, like foot and mouth to run its course - something once beloved (a heresy Jim Perrin tells me, carried by the fleeing monks of Llanfihangel y Traethau) is now without a name – Pelagius said if we don’t want to go backwards, we better run. A storm surge gathers out in the bay. Abandon the holy writings to the cilfachau (mud-creeks). Run!
And the shells: how gently they are broken and their bits make the beach, but how enigmatic are the ones with holes – deliberately made to be gathered and threaded on string – from the depths of the sea to the moon – each shell marking a life, to be positioned on purpose and not wild or washed-up anymore? Beachcombers pick those (auger, banded-wedge, cockle, limpet, winkle, razor, Venus, top, dog-whelk) shells from which god has escaped.
A vapour trail (a contrail spreading chemical-biological conspiracy) pours over Moel Goedog above the house we can see a light from at night and the very last house before the sky – now the cloud passes over it in its wandering ruin, bending with high winds until it’s melted into the blue spirit and the land too drifts and curves and its confidence thins to shadow behind the parked van.
A juvenile gull (with the imploring whistle) and its immaculate parent (with a pirate’s eye) dance for crumbs on the beach (Zen raked) around a pink Primark flipflop (just the one) there is a log (to perch on eating sarnies) and a spell scratched into wet sand with a stick (how much longer can we go on writing prose) cast to charm ashore those lost at sea and so it does, tides ebb and flow, stranding (in a beautiful & luminous trance) the barrel jellyfish (in-vitro flowers we call minds).
Whatshername (Eirian - the shining-fair): sudden glittery spillways over a sun-scoured ditch-brook-pond surface of the sea? Waves, (Morwen – maid of the sea): a tumble of caravans on grey folding fields. Weather, (Halgan – summer song): shafts of sunlight (sunbeams) and black reeds of rain tipped over the Llyn Peninsula. Ringed plover, (Gwerful – shy ring): picking kelp flies from twists of deadman’s bootlaces (Chorda filum) scummy with suds. Flight, (Telyn – harp): twenty plover fly as one, flash, quick, with much to lose. Sunset, (Gethin – dusky): an inhuman light behind the hills and they’re still at it, haunting the strand. Perseids, (Tanwen – white blessed fire): a meteor shower falls into the sea, what is left to wish for?
Crossing the high dune onto the sands in a storm: shot-blasted, the senses search for a language of representative feelings where the whole of past life swashes up the longshore drift between estuaries, a foreshore swept by tides so not recalled by memory but present and incarnated as snatches of music in the wind, no longer painful to dwell upon but intimate passages blending in hazy abstraction as the sun illuminates mountains with a passion, exalted, spiritualised and sublimed. I like the beach when there’s lots of people about. The first time we came there was only the three of us here, said the woman crossing the carpark, so we went home...Went for the first time last week, even though I’ve lived here all my life, said a woman walking a Labrador on the coastal footpath, my dad always said the sands went on and on forever, so we never bothered... The music, wraithsong, is lost to the sea or flies in kite shreds spinning up the beach but it is not communicated passively. Instead, it is an entry into dream: music is the guide out into the estuary, into a dangerous simplicity devoid of cultivation where sugndraeth (quicksands) are born, where the tide turns on the memory of those washed up here to make a name for themselves on the dark rum winds from the ocean. And then there are scoter. Out beyond the surf, black ducks in rafts of twenty or thirty separated by a hundred yards or so, scores of scoter all up the bay towards the peninsula, silent, seasick in the lumpy water, pelagic pilgrims of the storm abandoned to it and yet free. The scoter whistle their chants at sea. Only they can save themselves (There is no worse death than the end of hope, said Pelagius the heretic).