Wales Album: tiny portals

Close by was a little table with the words DRINK ME
written on the table in gold letters.
At Castell Powis, near Welshpool, Powys, Wales.

A tiny, tiny house belonging to little Alis
and her family at Ceinws--
but who could live in a house so small?

Clive Hicks Jenkins
invites me to climb up and pass through a portal
between two worlds--
one of them inhabited by strange beings.
At Meri Wells's house.

"'One side of what? The other side of what?'
thought Alice to herself."
In this case, it is one side of the portal.

The other side of the portal.

Dave Bonta, as curious as Alice (or Alis)
at a tiny portal in the "amorphous shrubbery."
Castell Powis.

Look at that Bonta-tongue!
(Click for a closer inspection...)
Here I think Dave must be a Green Man,
vomiting the vegetative world,
as the Green Man does so often in medieval church carvings.

Dave snug in the portal, content between worlds.

Wales Album: visiting Meri Wells, part one

Wandering, I find pottery guardians in the garden.
Am I in Wales?  Elsewhere, I think.

A glimpse of the ceramics studio and sheep field beyond,
with a table topped with an old piece of slate
that Meri traded for some concrete blocks.

A headless and quartered creature
pinned to the boards!

Meri Wells's studio, with a view of field and mountain.

Here I am rambling the yard--
earth alive with little scenes,
cunning nooks and crannies and surprises.



Table offerings...



Guard of the boundary between realms?
Warrior shepherd who bars the way?

A peep at the seventeenth-century house.
The thick flagstones inside are laid
directly on the ground, and sometimes
shift when the field mice tunnel underneath.



Maen hir of clay, pierced for looking

into another world.

Monolith among the bluebells.

Tea in the cool Welsh afternoon.

Meri Wells and Clive Hicks Jenkins,

with Peter Wakelin taking his ease on the grass.