Into the Glen after 8 dusk is falling – the bulrushes are lit up by the low light and still young hangers on at the yin yang a magpie crossing my path
I go to find the places of the cuckoo flower,
checking the sites I remember from last year – the ponds at the South side of the yellow bridge, the oil spill at the bayou, and this year’s find at the metal bridge… all there – though I find a patch at the oil spill is missing the pitch-perfect lilac delicacy, presenting wan instead, a ghost of itself, each and all the of the blooms opening their flowers to the Glen birdsong …..but no cuckoo
En route I stirr awhile under the swamp cypress, unable to resist wrapping my arms around the warm shaley bark and breathing in the air beneath the network of limbs overhead
Eastwards and there is a dog-sphynx sitting at the portal to the Fleischmann place pale and prominent, a little pal making its way down the zigzag detached from a human a few rows up, he struts passed me to one of his own.
Someone has made a bridge across the river, I saw them there last week balancing on the bendy branches waiting for a snap without a fall, two young men and a small child making impressions on one another… feeling the crunch the the ragged twist and splinter of the limbs as I passed, wishing they could be kinder to the tree they were using for their game.
…the light is creeping across the gravel making its golden presence felt in sedge and in the throats of the thrushes, blackbirds, tits, finches, goldcrests, robins, wrens, pigeons, crows, and mallards I cannot name them all but guess their songs from seeing them about the place and the intense cacophony of birdsound
There is a nest on the pond, a moorhen is in it, floating in plain sight I wonder how safe is she or her brood with heron and dogs, among others, about
I move west along to the high ground and the broom is holding out where the gorse used to be, softer and not so prickle-dry as its cousin, it has managed to keep a hold of the ground, the other hill peeping out over its golden tops
moving on, doubling back on the lower path, I go to seek my stone, picking up another along the way and the army of Bracken is making heady towards the crest of the hill where the burnt old gorse spells out its story, i see the hatch in the groin of the wishbone path, a puff of cloud hovering overhead, a kind of halo, my stone sits heartchaped on the black compost…walkin on a notice activity in the dumping ground, gestures, telling another story of Glen life, held in the branches of the dried up gorse, witness to all that happens below.
Bracken emerges scalded out of the ground, in the new shoots I see the charring reached in below ground as they were forming but the heat didn’t halt the vigour of this primordial plant making its way to the air and the sun, tanned, the unfurling forms have a fetal quality new limbs testing themselves in the new air. The brambles are moving in as the old thorny bush lies down, some still reaching for the sky, the yellow glory much diminished and sadly missed. The road home whizzes by below urging me on I pass the Engineers gates as the Crescent moon comes into view
Dusk at the engineers gate