To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town,
starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits'
wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack,
fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine
to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the
muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the
Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound
town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the
fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and
publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher,
policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded
soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by
glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked
or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the
fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the
cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one
cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town
breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast,
and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the
darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where
the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark,
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the
processional salt slow musical wind in
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning
in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow,
coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in
the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with
gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night in
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation
cherry trees; going through the graveyard of
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in
the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the
blinded bedrooms, the coms. and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and
basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing
dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes
of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays
and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas
of their dreams.
From where you are, you can hear their dreams. …
There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed
cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse-shoes, gobble quack and
cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down.
Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell,
tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring whinny and
morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the gulls' gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing
river and sea and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings,
curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged
gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ
Morgan's general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna,
rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.
…
Outside, the sun springs down on the rough and tumbling
town. It runs through the hedges of
And in Willy Nilly the Postman's dark and sizzling damp
tea-coated misty pygmy kitchen where the spittingcat kettles throb and hop on
the range, Mrs Willy Nilly steams open Mr Mog Edwards' letter to Miss Myfanwy
Price and reads it aloud to Willy Nilly by the squint of the Spring sun through
the one sealed window running with tears, while the drugged, bedraggled hens at
the back door whimper and snivel for the lickerish bog-black tea. …
In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of School House,
dusty and echoing as a dining-room in a vault, Mr and Mrs Pugh are silent over
cold grey cottage pie. Mr Pugh reads, as he forks the shroud meat in, from
Lives of the Great Poisoners. He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round the
book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up at Mrs Pugh, poisons her
with his eye, then goes on reading. He underlines certain passages and smiles
in secret. …
Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr Pugh minces
among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through spinneys of murdering herbs,
agony dancing in his crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs Pugh a venomous porridge
unknown to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her until her ears
fall off like figs, her toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes screaming
out of her navel. …
Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats
down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the
voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and
watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the
earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm,
grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker
in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tuwoo
clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava,
Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time-weeping clocks with ebony beards,
clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time without ever knowing what time
it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives
in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy
will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six
different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock.
…
The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons
through the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping
in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the
goat-anddaisy dingles, nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds
sag and pillow on Llaregyb Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as
they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting
for pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal and snuffle of
yesses of the women pigs in rut. They mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun;
their tails curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug, after-swill
sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey Down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7N5ODlswiE&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuPO2Kvqlms