The burnings come in cycles, looking back over 3 springs of Glen photos I see the blackening is very much an element of April and March – and always the greening follows and the re-population, shoots are emerging now, bees now passing in and out of holes and spiders’ webs now joining stone to stalk and stalk to stalk and stalk to stone, catching the dew and the sun; while steam rises out of the moist, charred ground. Today is Good Friday, 15th April ’22 and I’m looking back through the moments since my last posting, moments trapped still inside my phone, trying to remember moods and thoughts as I traced my way through the park on those days in between, then and now.
the things poised and left on the charred slopes delicate and weighty at once
Gorse making drawings, feelings of sweep sweep arabesque charcoal and ash, loose and light in the surrounds I feel my breath in the intersection where the 3 stalks rise.
The spiders have moved in, making star formations, filaments catching the dew and the captured light making galaxies of the webs.
The stones are not exactly adrift without their vegetation, they make clear constellations, I pick one up then another, feeling their weight, texture and specific density in my hand, each with its own quality, a vibration of red sandstone or quartz or other gravely stone …. usually after handling I place each carefully back on its own footprint, occasionally I will pocket one for my own Glen home universe.
The steam rising off the charred earth in the morning sun.
In the dark of the Gothic zone there is the lit up residue of animal hair gleaming in the mud, I pass over and move on and out to the blue sky of the mother oak’s arms, the charred valley sides are mere passing shadows in her presence, and I find the site of the grooming session, discarded brush left bristling in the cleft of that old felled trunk, tufts of hair spotting and drifting over the bare ground in a rhythm of its own.
Bold as Brassicas – I pass the hatch and there they are, reaching tall for the Alder.
Passing the ponds I spy Greta in the deepest water, she evades my gaze in one of the vs of in the Ys of the branches, ever watchful, clever Egret, her presence made more by the broken line of my vision.
It’s cat and mouse as usual and I catch up with her later by the bridges, perched in the top of a mangled Alder, one legged and hunch-backed, her beak signing “that way” motionless from on high.
And on the human level there are the makings of a new bench where the last of the wooden ones stood, conjuring another memory of old and burnt. More cement, a tabula rasa for new commentary – “HAUNTY”
