So much happens all day every day – then there is a deluge – the river runs fast and with an urgency cutting through the Glen – filling spaces and gouging out where there is no channel to support its course, brown red brown opaque liquid clay fills the glen, swarming about trees, filling the mouths of the stone bridges, pouring over the concrete platforms of others – the element is water, and furious flow: matter resists, or is carried, then left, in the water’s wake – the Glen is thoroughly rinsed and combed, made orderly in the only direction the river knows,
there are castings and leavings as the waters subside – a pile of twigs on the hatch, riverine foot-prints of oak leaf litter pile by the benches – forming a transient re-enactment, echo and fleeting memory of the physical landscape left by The Great Ice. This present place of aftermath now already tidied efficiently up by diligent workers in hi-vis following their call.
I see the emergence of a lost pillar, an arrowhead into the past – for a moment revealed – and then erased again, here reburied in that place of forgetting – beneath the surface. I was witness this time (whatever will come of that) I know the Alder too watches on.
I find the words, humming the base (bass) line, mouthing Laurie Anderson’s voice, deadpanning: … this is the time, and this is the record …of the time…
A drowned mouse that mammalian vibration in amongst the the ravages of elemental force and plant resilience and crumbling human endeavour
