Dear Arthur,
     I like the first and second parts - think the rhymes work well, but I'm
not sure what you were trying to do with the cave part. It goes on a bit,
for me, and the typological parts make it seem tricksy. In fact, it seems to
me that this sort of thing works best in humorous poems. It doesn't seem to
fit in with the rest of the poem, and I think you should take it out and
perhaps revise it for a separate poem.
I think the way the last part echoing the repetitions of white, with
repetitions of green, works well.
 It is good descriptive writing,-what perhaps it lacks for me (and remember
I've been on a sonnet-jag for a while) is an underlying argument as
structure.
Kind regards,
     grasshopper
----- Original Message -----
From: arthur seeley
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2002 8:40 AM
Subject: New sub: The Aire Gap


The Aire Gap

(i)

I travel into night that thins to dawn,
into the Pennines’ massive shrug of fells,
unwinding light behind, the road trails down
between dark crags and shining walls, then falls
in the valley where rivers gather and rise,
mirror the colours of the changing skies.

Smooth white limestone blooms
as white as winter, white as wind-stripped bones
of sheep are white, white as the plumes
of plucked fleece that whispers over stones.

                        (ii)

I climb the bottom of an ancient sea and tread
the shells and corals of an antique reef.
Earth’s tale is written in every rock and read
in any piece I heft, book of ages, that leaf on leaf
shows life that knew the swell of Tethys’ seas
and the slow-pulsed tides of centuries.

Above, the curlew cries before the threat of rain,
circles the slopes where draggled ewes will climb
over the glacial gouge and dark moraine
pieced in quilts of settlement and hemmed with time.


                        (iii)
intrepid speleologist
once well inside
down that first sudden
d
r
o
p
on twisting r
                   o
                   p
       e
spun like a spider
over a clattering
welter of spray
twinkling
down and away
from you
into the darkness
below
when  the entrance
and the distant day
are long since lost

                                         put out the light

feel the mask of dark
utter dark
tightenoveryourface
closein
preisnswards
on your mouth and nose
like a hand
not yours
in the dark
your four senses
explore
reach out
into the cave
hear the trickle
in the blackness
the beast-lick of waters
lapping
twisting past
cold
hard aching cold
shaping the cave
around you
in the thick dark
the huge mass of the fells
pin you
punch inwards on your chest
tread underfoot
                   you
as you slither like a lizard
through the thin mud
taste the grit and ooze of earth
on your lips
coarse sand crunch in teeth
a pass
that
will
not
go
a way that pinches off
narrows
in
womb-tight -womb-night
where it is tomb-dark
your hand
before your face
and wide blind eyes
feels the unseen rock
the ancient life there
that once teemed and turned to light
locked in
the cold the wet and the hardness
pressing
and the throb
of time
be still and know
the suck and pulse
of its dark heart
the loops and whorls
as slow time
transposes
unravels
and folds newness in
hear the bowels of the earth
draining
and replenishing
then turn your face
from the depths and the dark
towards the lost light and the air
somewhere above moving over sweet green dales
fresh and bright with spring flowers under a broad blue sky



                                    (iv)

The Hill of Winds bulks black, its saurian back
and ridge consumes horizons and the dales below.
Threaded with waters, scarred by seasons’ rack,
flanks bared by the scour of gale and snow,
while over the lip of Ingleborough Hill
the drapes of morning mists in silence spill.

Aproned with scree, low farms and the long green,
green as mossed barns and hart’s-tongue’s fern
are green, as long wet summers are green
as green as new life springing by the quiet tarn.










.