dylan thomas's boathouse

a poem for my mother's birthday

My mother drives us to Laugharne,
drops me off at the lane.
My grandmother, at eighty-three,
can’t manage the walk.
I show her a photo of him and Caitlin at Brown’s Hotel.
Look at the face on her, she says. She’s as bad as him.
Caitlin’s proud face, chin high,
surveying her kingdom.
Not the type to sit home and darn the socks,
feed the chickens.

Until I was five we lived at the farm, the three of us.
Bapu, that’s what I called him, dead of dementia
before I could remember. Photos of him holding me,
little cotton and lace dress made by hand.
A long, unkind death.
My grandmother sanding the paint off the dresser
until her hands bled then varnishing it, gleaming mahogany.
It moved with her when she sold the farm. Four children
by twenty-three, the first at seventeen, a hurried wedding
unattended by her mother, Grandma May. My namesake,
a name I don’t go by. ‘The nerve on her,
when she was pregnant for her own wedding.’
My grandmother says she was a figure of fear,
tyrannising the hearth in Llangynwyd, stubbornly
alive until ninety-three.

My mother moved back to Wales for her,
picked her up from the floor of that big kitchen
where she’d raised four children and hundreds of pigs,
a line of black farm cats with no respect, a Welsh cob
who would walk into the kitchen and have porridge for breakfast,
didn’t know he was a horse. I can remember
getting eggs in the morning. The metal cavern of the barn,
pitch black and stinking of chickenshit.
Wisps of feather stuck to the speckled eggshells.
Dark orange yolks.

The other three had left her, bitter and greedy,
never forgiving her for selling the farm or for raising them
there. Her strong arms at work, rising before the dawn,
comfortable with innards and soft flesh. My grandfather
at the steelworks in Port Talbot. Holidays on the beach there,
borrowing a digger to dredge a pool that would fill with seawater.
Fishing over the drowned village in Kenfig, the sand dunes
like foreign desert, the heartsick ghosts of Sgêr calling
after shipwrecks.

My mother is crying, hands on the steering wheel
as we round another bend. The hedgerows here are high
and thick with foxgloves and primroses. She shows me the
difference between hemlock and cow parsley, the poison-purple stem
that burns in sunlight. I’ve loved my mother,
she’s been my best friend. You don’t know what a help she’s been to me.
I can’t stand conversations like this. A mean,
impatient impulse sticks in my throat. I want to say something that
will resolve this. I’m not a confidante. I’m a runner.
I wanted to do something for her, give her a few happy years. She hasn’t got long left. But she’s not happy.
You can’t make her happy, I say. You can care for her but you can’t expect her to be grateful. My voice sounds insincere and academic. I don’t know what it’s like to love without recognition or reward. Love that swallows lives,
makes bitter dregs.

She’s angry, slumping into a chair by the river,
complaining about the flagstones. It’s beautiful here,
this house my mother has made, the river running
down to its mouth in Laugharne. We watch a lamprey
make its nest. She tells me which birds are singing.
Every detail unravels a remembered stream which
tumbles out in astonished voice. Seventy years ago,
stuck in a tree because her brothers had dared her and left,
waiting for what felt like hours until Grandpa Dai found her.

Indolent and heavy hearthside I watch them stage an adolescent
power struggle, both unreasonable.
I am the voice of reason. I dammed up love when I moved away
to cold unfeeling England, afraid it would keep me here, tied to
her as she is tied to her mother. I told myself I’d never
come back to these valleys and hills
even if I had a child to raise. In the clapboard village hall,
erected in 1920 with funds from the Baptist chapel, the choir
is practising for the Eisteddfod. I remember the words.
Nawr lanciau rhoddwn glod y mae'r gwanwyn wedi dod
y gaeaf a'r oerni aeth heibio.

Caitlin Thomas looked Welsh, said she reminded Dylan of his mother.
The soft, ample Welsh breast, the cackle too loud. The platitudes over cups of tea,
the bowel talk, the doors unlocked and left open.
Not me: sprinting away first chance I got, squeaking all over the place,
pronouncing things properly, being sophisticated! Accent filed down,
roundness sharpened out in shape and syllable, making negronis.
Not Caitlin’s round cheeks and jaw, not my grandmother’s farmer’s
arms fattened on lamb stew and bara brith. She’d perish before
she let a guest go without something to eat.

In the boathouse I watch a film about Dylan. Swansea Boy,
found his home here, tried to write the Welsh Ulysses,
in the pub listening to characters, the music of old men set to
the lap of the sea in that great grey estuary, the violence of
mothers and wives, the alleys and hills and the grey pebbledash
chapels of his childhood and the slanting graveyards looking
out to sea. His own grave looking out to sea, the same view he
wrote with, smoking and agonising in the writing shed,
avoiding his children. Died in New York and ended up here.
The Welsh are always coming and going.

When Bapu died, her son had wanted her to live with him.
Sit in the corner and sew, do what the men told her, head of the household,
nevermind her red-raw hands and muscles and decades ahead of her.
They’d never forgiven her wilfulness. Living alone for the first time in her life,
grandchildren only showing up for money,
failing her. My mother taking her out for lunch,
a tiny, insufficient offering for everything she’d given.
She went to art college but quit. She was better than any of them.
Had something, a real talent, the kind of talent that takes a woman
out of Maesteg. Her fingers can’t thread a needle anymore.
I see the frustration flame in her eyes. She gets up and sits back
down. She can’t hear. She interrupts in anger. She wants my mother,
sitting next to her, listening to her stories. Dai with the cart who delivered coal,
baths taken before running water, the fire and brimstone
chapel she left and never went back to.

But there’s work to be done
and guests at the door.