Author Archives: cliolj

In response to Julies beautiful photo of the accommodation of the barbed wire by the growing tree, here is another image of welcome and incorporation by a willow tree. One branch feeds the roots of the mistletoe, while another support the weight of a boy. The time frames of all are different, but they areContinue reading “Accommodations”

The sun warm here too, but us less focused than you Glen-clearing folk. I so happy to go out without our dog, but with my drawing book, our son, and permission to play for an hour, just looking, while he walked. Such freedom under the blue sky, given to me. We talked of the longContinue reading “If you follow a sound…”

I love to think of you, Julie, looking deeper into your willow, and of the human reparations you witness there. This one, the hulk I wrote of, has a cracked surface like elephant skin which makes me think of long memories, and of how the many layers of its experience become its structure. This feelsContinue reading “call and response: Logan’s Meadow”

Here is a fragment of a ditch that is itself a fragment of the scarce water here and that so often dries to cracked mud by May. I anxiously witness the race for the frogspawn to hatch and grow legs before the water has all gone from its shallow bottom, drunk by the young willows,Continue reading “At the edge of a place of now”

12 years ago, I used to looked up into this mature willow, drawn by a hollow percussive rattle. 40 feet up, when the black woodpecker wasn’t there, the bored holes held his promise to return. Those branches were cut out in a major clearance of dead or splitting wood, and there was no more rattling,Continue reading “Big Willow Hulk Anchor”

Something placed to prevent two worlds colliding, mingling, using one another as passage. Here’s a bollard, been here a long time, growing bracket fungi on its top and sides. Smaller, less highly coloured than the one in Cork, and fed largely by nutrients in asphalt of different ages and in the cracks between them. It’sContinue reading “Response to the Call”

Today these places have changed again. The ice has gone, and the mud is deep and churned at least three times the width of where the path once was by feet trying to cross without sinking too deep. The margins have become the throughway, and the throughway is a pitted mire between them, part blackContinue reading “Where Something Else Was”