Wednesday is bright and light as I walk out well after dawn. I go to the stone bridges to see if Dipper is there and sure enough there she is! On the elbow log, dancing and prancing on her white legs, bobbing her white chest and blinking her white eyelids making play with the water, I watch for a while until she swoops towards me and under the bridge where I stand. I’m so happy to see her 🙂
Taking the path west I walk the length of the valley as I pass through and along the bare-armed corridor of winter trees, I see a glimmering golden fairy-tale mirage on the horizon, Knocknaheaney, lit up by the low slanting sun, ever unreachable as it appears in this last clear light of 2021.
Keeping this mood I stride over the bend at Blackpool by the Buddleias, ignoring their exposed crocks of accumulated trash, I walk the heath with my head in the sun and miss the path to the mother Oak, instead i keep along the upper path among the gorses and brooms and wonder idly if there is any witches butter to be seen. Too early perhaps for this special golden booty. I go to the end of the grove and find, among the relics of a party, some traces of unicorn.
I pause to find a place for this magical head gear and, instead of pinning it to the branches like any other lost toy, I am tempted to try it out, feeling what it might be like to be a unicorn, perhaps, just this once in the Glen. As I do the sun dances around me – the unicorn horn is an antenna for the dancing light.
I pocket it and walk back to the path’s fork and down to the mother oak, through the gothic zone, that feels darker these days, since that old fallen log with that special gifting pocket has been removed, (that special nook where L once left an oak gall and I an ivy leaf, a triangular stone and other pieces for the curious) and more gloomy. I put the unicorns head gear back on as I come to the well and gaze at my shadow, or is it a reflection? I can just make out the pinkish glimmer of the horn glancing off the dancing water.
a perfect song for roaming the Glen in today’s mood…
She was born to be my Unicorn
Robed head of ferns
Cat child tutored by the learned.
Darkly ghostish host
Haggard vizier of the moats
Seeks the sandled shores of Gods
Baby of the moors.
The night-mare’s mauve mashed mind
Sights the visions of the blinds
Shoreside stream of steam
Cooking kings in cream of scream.
Jackdaw winter head
Cleans his chalcedony bed
A silken word of kind
Was returned from Nijinsky Hind.
Giant of Inca hill
Loosed his boar to gorely kill
The dancing one horned waife In doublet of puffin-bill.
The beast in feast of sound
Kittened lamb on God’s ground
Ridden by the born of horn
Jigged like a muse on life’s lawn
Marc Bolan