St. Mark’s flies flagpole upwards / with the forelegs hanging down obscene / reaching some height blindly to connect / out from the long-stalk tri-separating up- / to-seeded rounds of pod like acacia what / is it called “‘hogweed’ I-don’t-know- / what-it’s-called-but-goats-love-it-and- / it-makes-them-burp-a-lot”

Tags

'scape, 2013, 8*, age, being, blindness, blue, books, breeze, Carol, contrapuntal, Derbyshire, flies, flying, grass, hill, mating, plants, seeds, shelf, speech, stone

                St. Mark’s flies flagpole upwards
                with the forelegs hanging down obscene
                reaching some height blindly to connect
                out from the long-stalk tri-separating up-
                to-seeded rounds of pod like acacia what
                is it called “‘hogweed’ I-don’t-know-
                what-it’s-called-but-goats-love-it-and-
                it-makes-them-burp-a-lot”

                stones like grouped books on a shelf
                some fat enough to stand upright by themselves
                some leaning
                some fat ones leaning anyway
                with twisted spine

                various stalks of dried grasses
                reach slightly arthritic and
                inflexible in the breeze
                their seeds spent but ragged contrapuntal

                to the distant hill risen
                too old to read
                too stone-blue to talk with
                there and always there
                and only there by its lone and ever self

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being & breeze wormhole: lesson from watching two crane flies work the evening / skating across the panes flying and pushing legs grappling / the glass crossing repulsive over themselves and clinging akimbo / for a rest until lifeless just to get their stickly bodies through to the light
blue wormhole: St. Edmund’s / Parish Church / Castleton
books wormhole: through the pane – poewieview #34
Carol wormhole: ‘quick – she’s gone to pay …’
grass wormhole: prospect
speech wormhole: municipal garden
stone wormhole: prelude: // travel

 

prospect

Tags

2013, 4*, bicycle, children, grass, house, portrait, sister, speech, walking

                prospect

                out from the house
                straight down the steps

                boing   boinng   boinng
                says the five year old

                with his bicycle while tcht
                says the nine year old

                sister behind him why
                don’t you do it the old-

                fashioned way walking
                her bike elegantly down

                the grassy slope

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

house wormhole: vastly
speech wormhole: lost and city ground
walking wormhole: handsome

 

industrial estate

Tags

'scape, 2013, 4*, blue, clouds, Eastbourne, grass, green, grey, industrial estate, paddock, passing, poplars, river, sky, waves

            the way the poplars line the
                      edge of the paddock
                the small river
            the waves and waves of cotton grass
                on the other side
                under blue grey clouds
                gathering from upstream
            under the wide
                      wide blue sky of the
                                industrial estate

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blue & sky wormhole: woven-through
clouds wormhole: traffic lights and broad avenue
Eastbourne wormhole: ‘hope for things to come’
green wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Snow
grey wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – snow
passing wormhole: beepbeep
river wormhole: the too big moon
waves wormhole: hello, luvvey, do you want a cup of tea?

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – A Sign of the Times

Tags

1967, 3*, air, autumn, blackberries, blackbird, branches, brown, change, chestnut tree, childhood, climbing, clouds, cottage, countryside, cows, echo, elm, Essex, field, grass, green, grey, hawthorne, hedge, hill, ivy, lark, leaves, life, memory, Michael J Redford, mist, oak, path, red, RF Hilder, rook, running, seagull, signpost, silence, singing, sitting, sky, skyline, snake, summer, sycamore, the Boats of Vallisneria, time, tits, trees, vista, walking, wind, woodland, work, yellow

A Sign of the Times

Things are changing around us all the time and when one lives with and through these changes it can be very difficult to tell when they occur.   Changes are more evident and in many cases more startling when one returns to a scene of bygone years, and this has never been made more clear to me than now as I sit beside a signpost in an Essex lane.   It is a contrast so shocking that it has left me quite numb, and it is difficult to understand how not only the facial character, but also the spiritual character of the countryside can be altered beyond recognition.

Some five years ago, I holidayed with friends who lived in south east Essex.   One morning I crossed the meadow at the rear of the cottage and entered Ten Acres which sloped gently to the woods below.   The full heat of the summer had abated to the mildness of early autumn and great mountains of cumulous, creamy topped, towered above me, their shadows coursing silently over the yellow-grey stubble.   Two glistening sea gulls above the oaks did verbal battle with a colony of rooks quarrelling in the elms and, far above, it seemed a thousand larks were singing.   Blackberries, some bright red others over-ripe and heavy with juice, shaded themselves in the hedgerow, and beside a weathered bale of straw, forgotten perhaps or left too wet for carting, a grass snake basked in the sun.

Gazing down the green slope, there came within me a sudden desire to run, to stretch my legs in great leaping strides, to see the hedgerows flash by in a blur and to feel the mild air stream about me.   I wanted to race the wind that went tumbling down the hill to the woods below.   Twenty years earlier the desire would have been satiated without further thought, but time passes and the unconscious brakes of inhibition condemn these simple pleasures to the memory’s store.   For one brief second I was a young boy again about to satisfy a desire, but then all too soon, I was a man again, and grown men are not expected to behave in such a manner.   To see a child walking along the road in an orderly fashion one moment and then break into a mad gallop the next is an occurrence accepted without question, but many an eyebrow would be raised if I were to do such a thing now.   Such are the many simple pleasures we must perforce leave aside as we grow up.   There are of course many other pleasures which take their place, but even so the illogical, spontaneous desires of childhood every so often burst within the heart and flood the mind with memories.

I had reached the wood and was a boy once more.   Gazing above, I felt a sudden desire to reach up and haul myself into the green branches.   One can climb a tree a hundred times and go up and come down a hundred different ways.   I think perhaps it is the additional dimension which gives tree climbing that extra fascination, for if one explores an area of ground, one has but two dimensions to contend with, but up here in a green swaying arbour, one has a third.   In the fullness of summer, high up in the sycamores and the chestnuts, there are green caverns to explore, and the diverging paths that disappear into the foliage above lure one on to the very top where, in green shrouded secrecy, one can survey the surrounding terrain.

To me, and no doubt to a large number of other adults, these things still hold a fascination and most of us are able to fulfil these old desires in one way or another.   It may be by toying with model railways or messing about in boats; it may be by dressing for the local amateur dramatics or taking part in a sport.   On the other hand, it may be by casting a furtive glance over the shoulder and climbing a tree.

After walking for an hour or so, I came upon a signpost beside an open gate and, finally bowing to the truth that I am no longer a boy, I sat beside the gate to rest my weary legs.   The foliage of the countryside had turned a very dark green, almost brown in fact, heralding an early autumn.   The grass between the drills of faded stubble would not grow much higher now.   It had been an early year altogether and quite a large number of farmers had managed a second cut of hay.   Now the harvest was done and the good earth awaited the plough and the frost.   Hawthorn berries were an abundant red across the headland and a distant skein of Friesians grazed their way slowly across the skyline above.   A tit leapt across my view and into a thicket close by and made the shiny red rose-hips dance.   All around was the gentle yet positive movement of life.   It was something to be not only seen, but felt.   Little did I realise then how all this was to be changed.

Now five years have passed and I am once more beside the signpost, but this year the summer has been short.   Already the trees are bare and possess that clipped appearance of a Hilder autumnal study.   The tall grasses in the leafless hedgerows bend stiffly beneath the chilly winds which have been noticeable this past month.   Gone is the suppleness in their sway, gone is the living green from their stems.   Soon a wintry gale will snap and blow them into the ditches to join the ghosts of previous years.   The lanes are filled with dead leaves, but no longer do they echo with the laughter of children as they wade knee deep through them, for nobody comes this way now.   The gate hangs askew on its rusty hinges and needs to be lifted and torn from the coarse grasses which grasp the bottom rail.   Such action however, is not necessary, for although the signpost once read ‘Public Footpath’, no one walks this way now.   The letters are illegible and covered with green lichen, and around its rotting base a small ivy begins to reach for the sky.   The footpath which ran diagonally across the field is no longer to be seen, not that this matters either, for the tiny lane bears no traveller save that of the drifting mists of autumn.

(R.F. Hilder (1905 – 1993), an English marine and landscape artist and book illustrator).

I gazed at the signpost and thought of the sweat that went into the making of it.   Strong backs bent to dig the hole, strong arms lifted the stout wooden post.   A craftsman’s eye morticed in the sign that is as square today as it ever was.   The painted letters have peeled and left but a ghost on the woodwork.   It doesn’t matter anyway, for no one passes this way now.   But it used to lead somewhere.   For someone the sign pointed to journey’s end; once cows scratched their necks upon it and children used it as a target for throwing pebbles.   But now it merely points to the wind.   There is a strange silence in the sky.   No rooks, gulls or larks can I hear; no animals rustling in the hedgerows.   Never have I witnessed such an empty land, a land so void of life and feeling.   Although the wind is cold upon my neck, I cannot hear it in the trees and the dead leaves, sodden from the wandering mists, make no sound as they fling themselves at my boots.   The ditches have filled with rotted vegetation and the water has spread.   Marsh grasses and wild flock have appeared for a brief spell of life.   And brief it will be, for six months from now, the new town will be born.

                Once I worked among green hills
                And as I worked I sang, oh yes
                I sang mid the trees, in echoing woods
                And o’er the dewy fields.

                I sang with the rising lark, whose voice
                Cascaded from above,
                I sang always a joyous song
                Of those things that I love.

                My orchestra came from the wind,
                From trickling brooks and rustling leaves,
                From earth below and all about,
                E’en heaven’s lofty eaves.

                But now my green hills lay beneath
                A glaring concrete face
                And where once sang the blackbird’s heart,
                Ten thousand people pace.

                So now accompaniment have I none,
                Nor reason for to sing.
                My heart they buried ‘neath the stone
                When marched the new town in.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air & branches & seagull wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – gull circling out at sea
autumn & hedge & leaves & trees & wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
blackbird & childhood wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – from arm to nature, doing nothing
brown & grey & path & red & silence & yellow wormhole: hello, luvvey, do you want a cup of tea?
change wormhole: reaching branch
clouds & sitting wormhole: and smile / like a bud
echo wormhole: fresh destiny
field wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – I suddenly / remembered
green & sky wormhole: through the pane – poewieview #34
life & mist & time wormhole: AT-tennnnnnnn – waitfrit waitfrit – SHUN!
oak wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
skyline wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
walking wormhole: trying to focus / on walking
work wormhole: travel

 

one day / in 1956

Tags

'scape, 1956, 2007, 4*, chin, collar, grass, Liverpool, mist, morning, mud, opening, park, railings, society, sun, tie, trees, water

 

 

 

                     in the park by the water
                     in the mist through
                     railings and sun

                     young trees in the grass by a
                     hill of mud and rubble
                     not yet turfed

                           one day
                           in 1956

                     his chin reared one way his
                     tie pulled aside and his
                     collar opened up

 

possible recursor to bass slap where and when the trees were not yet that strongly rooted …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

mist wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
morning wormhole: the figure “46” / in frosted glass
opening wormhole: a crack of lightning / in the dark of night
park wormhole: words tumble like / boulders – poewieview #25
society wormhole: listen willya
sun wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
trees wormhole: tired
water wormhole: inbreath

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment

Tags

1967, 3*, air, answers, beauty, being, bells, black, breath, breeze, brown, bull, cause and effect, childhood, clarity, clouds, cows, curtains, dancing, dawn, dew, doing, dusk, earth, east, Einstein, elm, energy, evening, field, freedom, grass, green, grey, heat, hedge, hills, horizon, identity, Jupiter, leaves, life, light, logic, meadow, mind, moment, months, moon, morning, mother, mouse, nature, night, nightjar, noise, openness, order, owl, questions, quiet, rabbit, rebirth, scarlet, September, silence, silhouette, silver, sky, slow, space, stars, summer, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, truth, ultimate reality, uncle, universe, valley, velvet, white, wind, wings, woodland, words

A Precious Moment

As after the heat of a summer’s day the face glows in the mildness of evening, so the face of the countryside glows in the mildness of early autumn.   The summer months have infused the merest suggestion of brown in the deepening green of the foliage and the face of the earth gives up its warmth to the stars above to see them dance.   It was into this calm that I walked one late September’s eve.   The evening star cast her unblinking eye across the heavenly dome to Jupiter in the darkening east and the nightjar echoed its song above the empty fields.   I stood at the end of the stack-yard and returned the disinterested gaze of a cow in the field beyond.

It is during these slow hours when the pace of the day has declined, that the smaller noises of the land become apparent.   The bull, who was tethered a full two hundred yards away in the next field could be heard to rattle his chain and blow down his nose at a particularly juicy clump of grass he has found.   Behind me in the ‘maternity’ box, a freshly calved heifer mooed huskily yet very softly as its offspring raised its head suddenly at a strange sound.   Perhaps it was the sound of ancient timbers creaking under the weight of centuries, or that of the leaves above whispering to the bowed stems in the hay meadow below.   Or maybe it was the very silence that enshrouded these small sounds that attracted its attention, for silence is so startling in its rarity and its beauty.   Dusk gave way to night and I became aware of the immense depths of space, the dizzy height of the mackerel sky, and although it was the clouds that moved, it seemed they were stationary against the clear black silhouettes of the elms and that it was the motion of the gibbous moon behind the clouds that alternately blackened and silver-plated the night.   Even at the tender and romantic age of sixteen I was aware of this quietude, and in one enlightened moment jotted down these few words on an old envelope:

         Soft, soft, the bell that tolls the evensong
         Across full summer’s empty fields serene.
         And slowly draws the scarlet cloak, the hem’s
         Black velvet, diamond specked, communes me with
         The white barn owl, who with his noiseless wings
         Doth glide and swoop upon the luckless mouse.
         Selene set within the lap of dusk
         Transmutes the living green to silver plate,
         Enshrouds my world with immobility.
         And with a quietude that frees the mind
         Of bondage from the peering eyes of day,
         I fain become the earth, the sky, the all.

But it wasn’t until my late teens that I realised there are two times during the twenty four hour cycle when such a quietude exists. One is just before the dusk and the other just before dawn.   Although both seem to be divisions between day and night, the prelude to dawn seems to me to be the more startling and more satisfying to experience.   In the evening the mind is released into a reverie bound by personal conscious thought, but during the morning pause one experiences a freedom and profundity of thought that is rarely to be found in any other part of time.

It is barely half past five in the morning when I start milking, but often I arrive at the cowshed half an hour before in order to experience this precious moment.   Although at this hour the ‘Stone that puts the stars to flight’ has yet to be flung, I can sense the great spaciousness of the valley before me.   Again the trees move softly and the long grass in the hay meadow sifts the breath of night, and I wait.   I wait for that incorporeal beauty that is the union of soul and nature.   It begins where the breezes end and the rustling leaves are stilled.   A serene stillness envelopes the woods and meadows and even I am not conscious of breathing.   I am drawn into the quietude and become part of it; become part of the very earth on which I stand; part of the universe through which I move.   I have become part of each blade of grass in the valley before me, part of every hill.   I feel myself part of the earth, feel its very movement through space.   Unfortunately mere words can no longer be the conveyance of the emotions involved (and I use the word ‘emotions’ for want of a better noun) for they become so expansive and so personal.   No longer can mere words impress the reader’s soul with such profundity of emotion that this experience releases within me.   Each must go his own way, search alone and experience it first hand and with an open mind.

A thought is born and from that thought comes two more.   The two are made four and the four made eight, a self-multiplying chain reaction of thoughts has been set in motion that flows with great haste through the mind; in fact a torrent of thoughts in one brief second, and yet each one is startlingly clear and leads the mind one step nearer the truth.   The heavenly dome is vast above the valley and the stars, thrown into their mythological patterns by the great cosmic hand, impress their presence on the mind with unusual brilliance and time is no more.   Now the mental hosts are converging, and step by step I am racing towards that vertex which is the ultimate truth.   The questions are being answered at an ever increasing rate, the startling, brutal logic disclosing the result of a preceding reaction which itself, reveals a cause.   So through to the highest plane the mind soars upon an ever accelerating reversal of the law of causation. But the pace is too much.   The mind flags and begins to flounder.   At this juncture the mind can be likened to a water skier who, while the pace is kept up skims along the surface in the sun, but immediately he slows down he begins to sink, until at length he finds himself floundering with no forward movement.   Now the mind has become weak and cannot comprehend the unfathomable thought.   But I have brushed the grey curtain; I have seen a light faint though it may be and both my physical and spiritual selves have been revitalised and my cup runneth over.

For most of our lives we are lost beings out of tune with life around us.   Only during such precious moments as these do we fit into the great harmonious chord; all things round and above have their special place in it, from the fat brown rabbit throbbing in the cornfields to the fleecy pieces of golden cloud that sail upon the pale green skies of dusk.   Worries, anxieties, tensions, all are reduced to their proper size in relation to life, and as the imperceptible ‘Left hand of dawn’ lifts the veil on the eastern horizon, we are cleansed and reborn with the stripling day.

It is only during such periods that nature can be reduced to anything approaching order, and that there is an order I am in no doubt.   Einstein’s inquiring mind was working on the universal equation when the workings of that very same equation stilled his physical being; perhaps now he has solved it, we in this life never shall.   The perpetual motion of nature is the perfect machine and we are part of that machine.   It is complete within itself, recreating its own new parts from the debris of the old.   No energy is wasted or lost, just charged in form.   Nature permits us a marginal tolerance within which we may make one or two adjustments to suit our needs and requirements, but beyond this we dare not go for we merely create more problems than we solve.

         So does she pass, the gentle night,
         Slow seeps the dawn upon the scene.
         Dew sparkling in the first light of
         The new day shows where she has been.
         The eyes of day now open on
         The dewy sward and gossamer
         Bows low beneath its pearly load,
         And hedgerows faintly scent the air
         With green along the unused road.
         And I am born once more and see
         The day as I once first beheld –
         A child within his mother’s arms,
         Another, within its mother’s arms.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air & field & morning wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
beauty wormhole: the policies came to nothing
being wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
black & wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
breath wormhole: inbreath
breeze wormhole: and that’s where I are
brown wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
childhood wormhole: 1964
clouds wormhole: reaching branch
evening & silhouette wormhole: tired
green & space & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
grey & horizon wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
hedge & hills & life & light wormhole: tag cloud poem IX – haiku is awkward / the more that is left in / like uncombed hair
identity wormhole: with endless love
leaves & mother wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
moon wormhole: don’t look / at her eyes – poewieview #18
night & silence & sky wormhole: a crack of lightning / in the dark of night
openness wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
silver wormhole: Jon
thought & time wormhole: inbreath
white wormhole: mauve
words wormhole: bloogying

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn

Tags

1967, 2016, Africa, air, autumn, book, colour, digging, earth, emerald, eyes, faces, field, garden, gold, grass, hill, horse, lawn, life, lunch, morning, peas, plough, poetry, reading, sky, skyline, sleep, sound, spiders, starlings, sun, sunlight, the Boats of Vallisneria, trees, uncle, wheat

 

 

 

autumn

                young wheat and emerald, in sese vertitur annus,
                reading an old poet in the garden, the sky is clear as face –

                                I had mown the lawn that morning just before lunch
                                and turned over the plot where the peas had been cleared –

                                                              on the steep hill opposite a horse pulled forward from a plough
                                                              moving slowly towards the skyline, jingle of the traces,

                                the book fell, the starlings flew, suddenly, I came awake
                                as the plough turned the field and spark of sunlight leapt,

                shoulder to mine eye, while the earth lay opened and dark-folded;
                                              (visitors had arrived, in quietude, invasion of linyphiids,

                                                              a thin gossamer between ridges – lapping under the sun –
                                                              bristles of random colour, a hundred yards long

                                                              and twenty inches wide and bare of future gold);
                                among the nemesia the book is retrieved, many lives

                                              will be lost, just enough will be saved, restless; this is
                                              thistle-down upon the air, here are crackle and pop

                                                                                 beneath the sky; the tree tops will be dipped in
                                                                                 old gold, and the swallows will be off for Africa

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to : The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air & autumn & eyes & field & garden & gold & morning & poetry & reading & sky & skyline & sleep & sunlight & trees wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
faces wormhole: a theremin note – poewieview #21
life & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion
sound wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
sun wormhole: between thoughts

 

The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

Tags

1967, Africa, afternoon, air, Apollo, autumn, awakening, beans, bees, beginning, birth, blue, book, bracken, bronze, caterpillar, child, colour, cottage, crickets, dark, death, digging, earth, emerald, end, eyes, face, field, flowers, forest, garden, generation, gold, gorse, grass, hazel, hedgehog, hill, hive, honeysuckle, horse, house martin, ivy, January, journey, joy, lambs, land, lawn, leaves, life, March, memory, migration, mind, moorhen, moorland, morning, mother, nemesia, Norway, oak, plough, poetry, purple, reading, redwing, sadness, seasons, seeds, silence, sitting, sky, skyline, sleep, smell, sound, spiders, starlings, sunlight, the Boats of Vallisneria, thistles, thought, time, transition, trees, uncle, valley, web, wheat, winter, woodlark, work

 

Chapter 1

The Wandering Mind

Autumn Thoughts

I sat in the garden one autumn afternoon reading an old poet.   The sky was unblemished, clear and pure as the face of a child and starlings were deep in conversation close by.   I had mown the lawn that morning just before lunch and turned over the plot where the peas had been cleared.   After this exertion and a good meal, I felt no pang of conscience as I turned my back upon the many other chores that cried for attention and took my book into the garden and relaxed in the warm soporific scent of honeysuckle and freshly cut grass.   After an indeterminable period my thoughts were lifted from the page upon my knee and I drifted across the valley to the hill opposite.   There the grade was steep, too steep for tractor or any other mechanical tool.   A horse therefore was leaning from a plough, moving slowly, almost imperceptively towards the skyline.   The cottage in which I then lived was very old and the hills opposite even older; no doubt at one time they were covered with forest, but many men must have witnessed that same scene before me, many men and many generations.   To them it was a common sight, but to me it was a rare and beautiful sight that spanned the centuries. The scene was timeless.

I felt my head nod forward quite suddenly and I came awake.   The book fell onto the grass and the starlings flew off more in indignation than fright.   In the silence that followed, there filtered through the warmth of the valley the faint jingle of the traces, and as the plough turned upon the headland, a spark of sunlight leapt from the polished harness; it was an impish child of Apollo that danced upon the horse’s back one moment, then without warning, leapt the great expanse of the valley and entered my eye within the same split second.   I realised then that here was a beginning; here, before the old year was done, was another just starting.   Here the earth was being opened up to let in winter’s icy fingers so that she might the better prepare the seed bed for next year’s crop.   Then as the mind’s awareness expanded, I felt that this was not the only beginning taking place, there were many more throughout the changing land.

Visitors were arriving, flowers were blooming, animals were being born.   All about me, as I sat half asleep in the quietude, a great movement of life was in progress, and I thought of another great movement of life that had occurred the previous autumn.   It was an invasion of our fields by the linyphiids or gossamer spiders.   We were drilling wheat at the time and as I crouched low on the footboard of the drill to clear a coulter that had clogged up, I beheld a silken counterpane of gossamer stretched between the faint ridges of the harrowed earth.   The effect, if the eye was held low enough, was that of a thin layer of water shimmering in the early morning sun sending off sparks of individual colour selected at random from all parts of the spectrum.   So taken was I with this scene that all thoughts of clearing the coulters left me as we rattled and jogged across the field, and when harvesting the same field this year, there, as a reminder of that small moment, was a strip bare of swaying gold a hundred yards long and twenty inches wide.

I retrieved the book and placed it on the seat beside me.   The starlings had returned and were even noisier than before and the bees were hurrying to and fro among the nemesia in the hope of collecting and storing that little extra for the months ahead.   Soon they will end their toil; soon they would maim and expel the unfortunate drones and retire to the centre of the hive with the queen in their midst.   The day was magnificent, more like mid-summer than autumn, small wonder indeed that the careless cricket continued to ‘sing’ unaware of the imminent peril of winter.   Many small lives will be lost in the approaching days of darkness yet, through it all, just enough will be saved.   Beneath the apparent calm of autumn is a restlessness; and urgency sweeps through the fields and woodlands as the wiser creatures prepare for flight or lay in stores for sustenance through the long twilight of winter yet to come.

Autumn is a season of transition, a season of intense activity; of flowers flowering and flowers dying, of drilling wheat and cutting beans.   Autumn is a time of birth and death; a time of awakening and a time of going to sleep.   It is a time for the young and a time for the old, a time of both joy and sadness.

This is the time of thistle-down upon the air and goose-grass burrs upon the stockings; when the gorse and broom crackle and pop beneath a March-blue sky and scatter their tiny seeds among the dry stems of the sapless grass.   Now the moors are stained a deeper purple, bracken becomes bronzed and the tree tops dipped in old gold.   In the derries the young caterpillar of the Purple Emperor wraps itself in dead oak leaves and sleeps until the great awakening.   When gossamer fills the air and hazel nuts turn brown the young swallows start on that amazing flight to the shores of Africa, a journey undertaken by their parents a year before who, curiously enough, do not show their offspring the way, but follow on some days later.   How many thousand autumns have witnessed this exodus?   Yet to what blocks of logic and fact can we in all our wisdom attribute this common thing.   The redwing and fieldfare arrive from Norway urging on the lingering house martin.   The woodlark sings, the ivy flowers and the honeysuckle blooms again.   And as the somnolent hedgehog rolls himself in his blanket of leaves, the last brood of moorhen is hatched.   Something sleeps, something awakes; something dies, something is born.

There is no real beginning or end to the year.   Even on the first of January the lambs are growing; leaves are forming within the bud and the young wheat carpets the bare fields with emerald.   But for those whose minds cannot accept the existence of that which has no beginning and no end, then let the division between the years be drawn through autumn, for the onset of winter is really the beginning of the year, not the end.   The young year is born into a cold and sometimes frightening world just as the infant child is released from the warm security of the mother’s womb, and like the child, the infant year begins its life before it is born.   It begins in the womb of autumn.   It is here then (if anywhere) that one thing ends and another begins.   It is here In Sese Vertiture Annus.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1967 & garden & life & mind & thought & uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
afternoon wormhole: “walking …”
air & sound & time wormhole: constant hummm
autumn & gold & sky & smell & trees & work wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
blue & reading wormhole: between thoughts
child & sleep wormhole: 1968
death & eyes wormhole: too late:
field & skyline wormhole: impressionism
leaves wormhole: work
morning wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
mother wormhole: and that’s where I are
oak wormhole: dog bark
poetry wormhole: after all?
purple wormhole: 1967
silence wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
sitting wormhole: zero
winter wormhole: 1963

 

up on the hill

Tags

'scape, 2013, bench, childhood, electric, emergence, grass, grey, leaf, London, Nithdale Road, orange, Plum Lane, Plumstead, purple, rooftops, shadow, Shooters Hill, shrub, streetlight, sunlight, Thames, Woolwich, writing

 

 

 

                                up on the hill

                                there is a bench
                                and a streetlamp which casts
                                introspective orange
                                over shrubs and grass
                                making them purple and indistinct

                                but over descending rooftops
                                and terraced rows
                                the city leafs out into evening
                                from the grey Thames
                                wet with electric sunlight

 

‘up on the hill’ is not the same ‘up on the hill’ which is the start of Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’, but it starts from a similar call; the ‘hill’ is Shooters Hill which rucks up in the south east London basin just short of the Thames; the ‘bench’ is one of a few on a piece of land at the corner of Nithdale Road and Plum lane overlooking Plumcroft school, the lower slopes of Plumstead and the sprawl of the developing Woolwich Arsenal estate to the Thames as you raise your gaze from the ground, eveningly; this is a small, open patch of land which doesn’t obviously seem to belong to anyone, but is important to any awkward teenager who may wonder if their way is in writing …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

bench wormhole: bougainvillea
childhood & emergence & shadow wormhole: the start of adolescence
grey wormhole: and that’s where I are
London wormhole: tabla
orange wormhole: stacked
Plumstead wormhole: finding my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915
purple wormhole: don’t look / at her eyes – poewieview #18
rooftops wormhole: keep the light off
streetlight wormhole: sixty four sixty five – poewieview #1
Thames wormhole: dream 260815
Woolwich wormhole: crease and score of silver-morning sky
writing wormhole: first Spring storm

 

finding my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915

Tags

2015, advertising, afterlife, alignment, alley, angel, apartment, architecture, ash tree, Ashlar Place, balcony, baptism, bay window, beech, belief, Beresford Square, Bloomfield Road, boundary, brick, brown, building, buildings, bus, cars, change, childhood, church, compassion, crane, daughter, death, decades, Eglinton Hill, family, glass, God, gold, grass, grey, gurdwara, halo, hedge, hill, history, houses, identity, iron, jet plane, John, khanda, Lee Rigby, leylandii, life, lime, living, London, loneliness, looking, love, memory, mother, Mum, Nan, passing, photograph, pipes, Plumstead, rain, red, rooftops, sandstone, shadow, shop, sky, smile, society, sound, stone, streetlight, streets, suitcase, sun, the British Empire, time, traffic, travelling, trees, true nature, walls, wind, Woolwich, Woolwich New Road, writing

 

 

 

            looking for my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915¹

            these times of being cut loose are more usual than comfortable
            the buzz of contact and identity more potential than actual

            I go up to London to find bits of my true nature somewhere
            deep inside the forty four miles of time that has elapsed,

            past the same street boards advertising new plastic on trend,
            in even more colourful lime but now un-im-bleach-able;

            where grand gable and architrave stand cleanly revealed in all
            of their time from behind trimmed hedge, but window bay and

            fanned lintel remain obscured behind opportune ash (and
            where crickets rasp in raised lawn to ear level off the hill); on

            the hill² a crack in the front wall sinking century-ly downhill
            under sounds of jet somewhere in the sky hidden by dampening

            of leylandii; did I get baptised at All Saints Shooters Hill³,
            or did my brother, when the church was still young, its

            thousand panes held individual by lead, reflecting the
            cubist street, I don’t remember now – fractured memory;

            where sandstone is shaped short in modest Empire-control: in
            niche and ledge and decorative finial, during all the wind of

            cold streets, withstanding the new redbrick of decades; I
            cannot draw the line of brick at the corner of Bloomfield

            Road, true neither to hill nor sky nor shadowed underledge
            to the proud cornice (boundaries to distant-impossible crane)

            or even the sharp roofs clipped to lead-clad valley, let alone the
            ample iron downpipe … but I have learnt to write the architecture

            of odd alignment and cut-through alley; perched now against
            Ashlar Place at just the right angle between sun-wipe and shadow

            (shiny haloes in the indents on the page as I write Gurdwara
             Sahib Ramgarhia Temple⁴ in biro), the architecture of

            eternal Empire highlighted in gold with khandas blowing
            in the wind … still cannot obscure the luxury apartments in

            constant construct: -ING IS BELIEVING;⁵ buses come and
            buses go all along Woolwich New Road before the clapping

            troup of ‘Time for God’ angels and their families stood around,
            full of God’s immanent voices, in and out of sight and chant,

            (I have an old photo: a man crossing the road from Beresford
             Square⁶ with box suitcase in grey [and suggested brown] after

            apparent rain … when the retired newsagent passed by adding
            that he had run that shop opposite for thirty years, how –

            much – it – has – changed); perched, now, on the Metropolitan
            Drinking Fountain & Cattle Trough, oiled and crust stone

            from hide-breath and redundant exhaust; a mother and slinky
            daughter watch the marching bands pass from their third floor

            balcony, height of streetlight, defined before the upright
            sea of tarp covering the next block of the Royal Arsenal

            Riverside in construct (surprise!); ah, Lee Rigby,⁷ under height
            of Elliston House, these cars pass far too quick to get

            to their traffic, those beech trees opposite have grown to
            lean downhill for fifty years and more; I looked at every

            plaque, Mum, found plenty of Jeans and Margarets (and
            even Gladyss) but no Redfords, I can’t think I would have

            missed you sixteen years into other existences … I don’t
            know: I smiled at some of the plaques as I looked for you,

            I shall smile at everyone now that I haven’t found you

 

¹ this peice follows my last visit to London: walking downhill from Plumstead to Woolwich and around and back, driving to Eltham to where my mother (Jean Marguerite Redford 1933-1999, daughter of Gladys Charlotte Conlay 1906-1989) was cremated
² Eglinton Hill, early childhood home
³ All Saints Shooters Hill
⁴ Woolwich Gurdwara
⁵ woolwich new road and buildings
⁶ true nature II
⁷

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

brown & love & red wormhole: when in Belgium do as the chocolates do
buildings & life & streets wormhole: gotcha
bus & sun wormhole: Christmas lights / around the lamp post
cars wormhole: portrait: / two pigeons
change & gold & Woolwich wormhole: ING IS BELIEVING
childhood & Nan wormhole: new garden
church wormhole: you can only smell the candles / when they have been snuffed out
compassion wormhole: [s]
crane wormhole: com- / mute
daughter wormhole: the retriever the daughter and the mother
death & writing wormhole: Poewieviews
Eglinton Hill & London wormhole: the breath of London
family wormhole: let’s have some ice creams
glass wormhole: ‘in clear oil air …’
grey & identity & time & trees & walls wormhole: walking through Lewes
hedge wormhole: the continental stride of trains
history & Mum wormhole: sit
lime & sky & stone wormhole: David Bowie – Iris
living wormhole: currency: / assent for statement – / ‘smakin’alivvin’
loneliness wormhole: ‘passing overhead …’
looking wormhole: Office at Night, 1940
mother wormhole: gre[wh]y / has Daddy left us?
passing wormhole: clouds
Plumstead wormhole: dream 260815
rain wormhole: “walking …”
rooftops & smile & streetlight wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
shadow wormhole: Seven A.M, 1948
society wormhole: the Growing Man
sound & wind wormhole: the open window
travelling wormhole: Compartment C, Car 193, 1938