My stare, so shameless, the mountains return
And answer, like a mirror, my bullets behind glass:
I’m brain-shot with disharmony and harmony, in turn,
As weed-spotting eyes makes a tourists’ farce
Of the kitschy wallpaper of the Beddgelert pass -
None stranger than Rhodo,¹ or homelier to stranger!
I thought I could paint a better canvas with my eyes.
So, all journey long, they become the arranger
Of aesthetically compelling features, like skies
Flecked with cotton, cypresses that disguise
Hard-edged buildings, tree borders to the road
Giving glimpses of reservoir, the patchwork of conifers
Glaucous and discordant against the ochre and sheep-mowed
Uniformity of moor, the textures of furze,
The profusion of geometric shapes and colours,
The exposed bleak summits, the windmill’s personage,
Forested ridges stinting the moor -
Then the slough that completes my aesthetic pilgrimage
And embogs my tentative efforts to explore
A self-renewing beauty that enters by the back door. -
And all that splendour just ended in valuations
And abandoned brushes! Love alone paints loveliness,
Colouring in its theme from the palette of associations
With the paradise of memory or taught by neighbourliness -
And love goes West without the pain of homesickness.