A cold morning and snow as promised, it feels good to wrap up in scarf and gloves and face some weather. I meander as usual. finding my direction and the pull, as ever these days, is eastwards. Still wondering about walls and trees and architectural spaces that include the body in particular ways. Slipping between young trees feels good in a gentle fall of snow. I’d been looking at the roots in the walls and the spaces where beams had gone before, where square wrought timbers have left rhythmic voids living ones emerge in other places. Roots swirl out of the brickwork, levering chunks of mortar, ceramic and stone as they spiral out and up, the broken bits partially wedged, balancing permanently precarious they offer a strange feeling of time encapsulated, concentrated, leading up to this moment of looking.
Ear forms attach themselves appropriately here to the trees, listening, hearing from below
I pass by the oyster now looking pretty much like it’s returning to the tree, no longer expressing fleshy lushness, so fitting before with the silvery finery of the silver birch bark its body more akin now to the dry epidermis of the decaying tree. I have read that the life force of a tree is in the layer closest to its bark and this old birch has had so many inroads and self repairs it’s a patchwork of skin trying to hold itself together.
I see a bottle float by on the pond masquerading as a duck, leaving its own wake in the surface of the water. Here beside the Prosto bench is a strange pile, some blue chips – burnt, melted and reformed from a recycle bin, now gathered and heaped with twigs – a fire in the making? Odd I remember I’d kicked a chip off the path yesterday, way over by the Blackpool entrance. I wondered had I troubled something into action by this attention.
Further along I pass the broken willow dipping its long fingers into the lake, its mossy knuckles bearing new growth, I imagine life coming in through the water, at its finger tips instead of the broken trunk and disrupted route from the ground.
The Brigid’s cross is still here at the well, attracting pink things ten days later. The ivy and its million legs is still attached to the trees though the trunk has been severed (I believe by the woman I saw last spring, furtive with hacksaw, partner and dalmation on watch by the well with her bike)
There is a feather in the high ground and I look across and see the row of brick houses a a human spine on the other ridge.
Walking back through the gothic quarter a woman waves me down, its K who I find out comes down from the other hill – Fair hill – to walk in the Glen, the hill and up again each way, scribing a couple of daily Ms in her walks. It’s nice to make contact today, we talk of the weather and walking, and the homeless people she sees every night in her voluntary work in the city. A gaggle of men with their dogs pass us, at the same time dancer M and her dog pass from the opposite side, we make a small knot before crossing over and going our separate ways. I catch up later with M and Corey at ‘the snake’, she shows me the new trick he’s learnt, walking the spine.
Trees in pairs feature in the Glen.