"Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements"

The Welsh tradition of Mari Lwyd (sounds like "mary loyd") hearkens back to ancient Roman and Celtic veneration of horses. 

According to Sarah Parvin, a Jungian-trained psychologist who blogs at The Curious One, "the cult of Mari centres round a mare's skull bedecked in sheet and ribbons, which is carried from door to door to mark the passing of the longest nights of midwinter. The Mari is accompanied by a band of mummers, in the guise of the dead, who ... seek admission into the houses of the living. Upon gaining entry, food and drink are enjoyed by all and blessings bestowed for the coming year."

Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins recalls his father being incredibly scared as a child when the Mari Lwyd came around; a series of paintings Hicks-Jenkins subsequently created serve, Parvin says, as a "personal meditation on the death of his father and an elegy to the friends and colleagues he had lost during his theatre career to the AIDS epidemic." 

Now, American poet Jeffery Beam (jefferybeam.com), who lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina with his husband, has collaborated with the artist to produce a book of mesmerizing poems about, as the writer told me in email correspondence, "the transformation of masculine and horse energy into ... something else." Both writer and artist take American dancer Jordan Morley as their muse.

"Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements" ($21.95 in paperback from Kin Press, kinpress.org) includes fifteen poems, one song, three essays (including the one by Parvin), and nearly two dozen paintings.

In one sense the Mari Lwyd is Halloween-frightening. "I am Pegasus Spectral/ Pegasus Reversed" the poet writes; "I am your nightmare-longing toward dust/ Be not afraid. // Stop shaking/ Every funeral prophesies resurrection...."

In "Drift," "Mari Mari Lwyd having never spoken your name/ your name becalms me/ Right hand to heart left hand gloved closed holding a secret/ Void's origin waiting to be opened/ for you as you are for me my stalwart."

A secret? Two, actually. In "Pegasus," the words have a particular resonance: "Liberty and Love the two Great Secrets/ Making the Divine Mind smile/ Making Death forget himself and sing/ Paradise regained/ Without contraries is no progression."