Obligations have taken me away to working in other places and the gold and black of November walking has brought me along the concrete pavements into and away from the city centre and away from the deep spell of the Glen.
I am once again picking up my foothold, Saturday in the cold rain and today again. Swamp Cypresses have turned their orange-red fizz and now dropped red-brown and spiny to the ground, I stand a heavy mammal leaning into the barky skin rhyming into the sky from her own nourishing carpet, her branches fringing the red between herself, and all around herself and me here breathing in her cypress scent, suspended in the orange halo of her tentacular reach into the Glen environs.
I look now at that image I trapped inside my phone and see the veinous quality stretching to the four corners, the view made square in digital space. Each border’s edge implying a continuity beyond its visible reach, I feel the cypress wrapped around me and wonder would another (who had not experienced this moment) feel her gentle embrace. Has this squared-off qaudrilateral the capacity to muster the un-captured space beyond its edges, that space that beckons felt memory? Looking now I imagine it squeezed inside its borders somehow condensed, like tinned soup or my foot in Cinderella’s slipper.
I move along the old Rope path, Eastwards to the Fleischmann place and stand on the bridge over the Glen river, I face the river as she runs under the stone arch of the old mill house, between the old mill walls, stony walls, now finger holds for trees. I am here standing on the old stone bridge. River moving under me, I join her in sound. Now vocal with water’s coming, feeling the vibrations as they well up from inside reaching the stone walls and the channel below. Mouth shape an echo of the stone arch. Damp warm sounds from within. I turn around and am brought inline with the river’s flow, brought along with the rivers endless moving away, my sound becomes a repeated hush as the water leaves again and again on and on, no vocal this time just release.
There are still leaves hanging golden in the trees, Sycamore, Elm, Dogwood, Hazel flapping, fluttering, or still as the gentle wind wills them to drop. I hang awhile in Hazel’s branches, looking through her flittering leaves; tomorrow brings storm Barra, and that will be the final sweep to clear all trees back to bare once more in the Glen.
The Weather is turning wilder and I promise myself a trip down to the hatch and back before I turn homeward. The unidentical Alder twins, and their taller sibling, are minding the bend of the river as she glides below the path there is a magnetic pull to this wee circle, making me hover and dance in that space before making the decision to take the path homeward.
I round onto Glen avenue and a rainbow hovers and disappears in a flash as I turn into the Park.
