Christopher Meredith’s Air Histories starts in the Stone Age and ends in the future. It’s marked by formal diversity and a wide range of subjects, with the personal alongside the impersonal and the experimental alongside well-known forms, including some translations from the Welsh. Throughout, it engages the rich meanings of its title, touching on the elemental and on historical time, as well as music and story, meditating on human creativity and its fallibilities. Gorgeous and original descriptions of nature in Wales are also prominently featured, particularly the Black Mountains, near the author’s home. Christopher Meredith is a professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan and the author of the novels  The Book of Idiots , Griffri , Shifts , and Sidereal Time . He is also the author of three poetry collections and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Council of Wales Young Writer Prize, and the Fiction Prize for his first novel, Shifts . Air Histories By Christopher Meredith Poetry Wales Press Ltd Copyright © 2013 Christopher Meredith All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78172-074-5 Contents Arrowhead, Borderland, Trees on Castell Dinas, What earth thought, The record keepers, Y grib, Ridge, At Colonus, The churches, The guitar maker Antonio de Torres in old age described by the priest Juan Martínez Sirvent, The ones with the white hats, Birth myth, The slurry pond, Daniel's piano, Guitar, Not quite Apollo, Think of this, The strange music, Seeing the birds, Stori'r mynydd, Under the mountain, Alchemical, Peth doeth, You were right to come, Twobeat deathsong, Dream, Dim byd, Nothing, Bro Neb: yr arweinlyfr, An outline description of Nihilia, This late, An empty chair, the old man's face, Birch, Thaws and disappointments, We dream of snow, The fiddler's frown, Daedalus with a paramotor, Earth air, The near myth, The wool of the sheep that bit you, Acknowledgements, Notes, CHAPTER 1 Arrowhead fire unlock ed the mou ntain and rain and wind brush ed earth by to strip to air what's reified in stone, green double wavelets in a piece of sea jade flatfish swimming time a hardening of fallen sky that should whisper death or meat but somehow can't becoming something never meant in all the patient knapping to perfected brittle symmetry strange midair fingerprint stone cursor pointing to this hour flint promise of our later fire that never flew or sang till now     Borderland     Ffin is the Welsh for border. It occurs inside diffiniad     which means definition, and in Capel y Ffin, a place     in the Black Mountains.     You'll find a ffin inside each definition.     We see what is when we see what it's not:     edges are where meanings happen.     On the black whaleback of this mountain     earth curves away so sky can start     to show a ffin's a kind of definition     where skylarks climb across earth's turn     to air and pulsing muscle turns to an artful     song the edge that lets a meaning happen.     Live rock can yield to mortared stone,     a city to a castle, then a shepherd's hut,     where ffin's contained inside a definition,     where the lithic turns into the human.     Here's where things fall together, not apart     at edges that let meanings happen.     And self here blurs into annihilation.     Larkfall, earthfall, skyfall, manfall each create     the ffin that is the place of definition     the edges where we see our meanings happen.     Trees on Castell Dinas     Stripped to their themes     the winter trees     are the sum of their seasons     bombbursts of filaments     in pulsing harmonics     enact their contentions in air     work into eyesight     with ogive writhing     invisible veins of the wind     solidify rhythms     into the pathways     of hunger for light     What earth thought     When wind blows to kill rain, earth     thinks warmer under sun and breathes     smoke. Grass squeezes out of stone,     walks under tree and over mountain.     Man walks with animals under moon.     Dog drinks lake. Child sucks woman.     Child sleeps with smell of milk and woman     who sings to call the seed from earth.     Man sings to beasts. Dog sings to moon.     They turn their hunger into breath.     They walk the belly of the mountain.     They hit the yellow fire from stone.     And what swells in grass, with stone     and stone they kill. The woman     burns seed under mountain.     They laugh it out from blackened earth.     They turn their hunger out of breath.     They sleep beneath the bitten moon.     The river's warm with yellow moon     swimming above the river stones.     They sing the songs of warmth, and breathe     the song of meat and fruits. The woman     knows that ice will bite the earth     and grass sleep again on mountain.     Black cloud will