The Glen is on the turn, hardly a winter, a handful of frosts since Samhain and sensing the fingers of spring already, trees barely bare and their leaves litter the ground a fallen ivy burning its flame red veins and golden among the deep tannin browns, their leafy edges still precise. There was a sweeper here during the week making up piles of leaves under the trees, it seemed like an utterly pointless task, a job to keep a man busy, and unusual enough to see one from the council on foot… the puff balls clench their thin and withered cheeks around a black breath and I can’t resist a poke to see them exhale… up on the heath I find I’ve missed the juicy stage too… of the witches’ butter
Heading through the kissing gate at Sunview East with the tags of the clean up posters still fluttering yellow, and so witches butter yellow that I haven’t been inclined to cut their jute strings – they claim their place on the rails, tickets to the circus of birch and hawthorn.
I pick up a stone almost every day from the highland and bring each lump home, like teeth A says, I like the way the numbers form, clustering from one to six, and here masquerading somehow as a five; there is something of the constellation of Orion in it… my thoughts play of swivelling the extremities to capture the feel of the hunter’s shoulders, and i see now I need at least a seventh not just to make up a full week.
The first stone I picked had a seam aligned with the stripe of the path where it lay, magnetic pulling along the Glen axis of East West, attracting my attention. Here at home, the way it has landed points the other way North (to the way it came) catching the afternoon light on its Western cheek, while the group are holding their shadows on the kitchen counter.
The thrown Pink jacket has faded to blend with the colour of the old man’s beard that spreads over everything on this side of the Glen, now incorporated into the vegetaion
the line of felled elms now show individual corsages of honey fungi like stump debutantes presenting to the ghosts of their fallen silhouettes
i am not sure why this tree conjures lock and key, but it seems to me it does, especially now when the birdsong makes the space around it.