The walks were made in September and October 2013. I made the walks in the dark of night with no torch or mobile. I avoided the forest paths and cut straight through the untouched woods. Not to be recommended unless you are happy with yourself in deep darkness. The poem extended itself into a meditation on existence and the Absolute. It is linked here. A year later I found myself wanting to make the walk again and write a shorter, tighter account. This poem is the result. It has 162 lines and the blank verse is smoother than that of the first poem, although still too rugged for my current taste.
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(Thursday 2 October 2014, 7.15 pm – 8.10 pm)
A
half moon, golden-bronze, threw
silver light.
Awkwardly
stumbling through the woods, unpathed,I rued that light for in the chasms of
The thinning oak and maple crowns its glare
Was dazzling, swamping night sight like a wave
Collapsing saltily and forcing me
To duck my eyes; to no avail; two steps
And once more under cover, my sight was gone
And blackness like a squeezing hand stopped dead
My track until by grope I could gauge a way
Ahead. The wood was silent, frigid-still,
Except with timefelt slowness like a surd,
A stick or acorn or a green-pursed chestnut
Fell through the branches with a bouncing rustle
Till gruffly thudding in the forest mould.
Just once that night I heard a rabbit with
A panicked scuttle dash through undergrowth,
And once a rat or vole discreetly nipped
Through holly, disdaining my marauding feet.
A streamlet rattled thinly, trickling over
Poultices piled by rotting chestnut leaves,
Blackly wadded and sour like sodden dishcloths.
But no owls called, despite the moon’s halloo
To go a’hunting; and the wind stood still,
This October night of summer’s final warmth.
Working by toe-touch through the wood’s incline
The year’s leaf-fall eddied about my feet,
Faintly fawn in the scattered shards of light.
Taut as shavings and dank as mildewed rope
There were dried-flesh oak leaves, clawed like witches’ hands,
Yellowing black-blotched lime, as flat as skin,
And tubelike paper scrolls of chestnut leaves,
Copper-orange and crushing underfoot
Like soda crisps. In screes they banked about
Old branches, tumbled on the ground like limbs
And rotten as stale bread, crunching queasily
When trodden like a snapping of dead men’s ribs.
Draped between boles and blank-dark holly bushes,
Spiders’ weavings enswirled my face and neck
With leaf-hung web, clinging to lips and tongue
And launching fast-legged spiders to dash through hair
Or over cheeks, chased by my slapping hand.
Wind-fallen aspen trunks debarred my way,
Mere bars of blackness in the clinging dark;
Bestriding them cost legs and ankles dear
As unseen brambles clawed at bone and nettles
Invaded leggings with their stinging stab.
Vague at my shoulder was a musty stand
Of dust-strewn, cobwebbed rusty-brittle ferns,
Now dying back but still I knew from dire
Experience a haunt of skin-drawn gnats;
Always, on these nocturnal treks, I bore
The black-blood blisters itching like a goad
From previous hikes. At the woods’ steepest plane
I slowed to an ill-footed indecision,
The unmoving dark as thick as Hades’ fog;
The forest slope was chocked with fallen birch,
The ground was grubbed as if prospectors had
Left the earth pitted, treacherous to the foot.
So, wincingly, toe-tapping like some dancer,
I nudged my way by touch and guess across
The boles and through the holly stands and brambles,
An arm extended with an upright stave,
Like Orpheus lurching in the underworld,
To ward off creepers, hanging web and branches.
The wrapping darkness, silent as a sump,
Was like a pressure on my eyes, which, if
Allowed, might easily unnerve a novice
Walker of my bizarre nocturnal route,
For this is not a place to jib and twist
An ankle, snap a ligament: the ground
Is hard, the night long, pre-dawn black and freezing,
And even shouting in a mobile phone,
Discovery would be unlikely till
The morning and your rasping cries might warn
A distant dog walker or earphoned jogger.
Enough! Dustily-sweating, short of breath,
I topped the slope and forced my way through gorse
And a flat ditch into a bridlepath.
The path was sandy, friable like meal,
Heaped and hillocked by horses’ hooves so that
My feet slid widdershins as I began
My long tramp homeward. Moonlight cool as paint
Emulsioned trees and grass with silver salts,
Throwing sharp shadows as if some painter
Had crisply contoured them with a firm brush.
To think that half a moon could shed such light!
Its beaten gilded curvature was pocked
With the scars of its brutal years aswirl;
It hung in the heavens like a lopped stump,
Lacquered, indifferent to the world beneath.
The moonward sides of oak and chestnut trunks,
Fringing the way, were patched with plaques of light,
Soapy and soft like mould; to the leeside
Light fell across the track and bramble piles
In soft-edged bars as if the silver birch trees
Had fallen and sunk into the black-mopped bushes.
And even single leaves, more faded in
Decay than others, eerily shone like suede
Or creamy eyelets blinking from the shadows.
As I tramped, the path debouched through forest clearings
And here the moonlight spread in milky spillings
Of gruel or glinting, finely-scattered sand.
The sky was clear. Despite the moon’s bright light
The stars glimmed whitely and the blatant Plough,
Slung low, furrowed the trees’ black crowns as if
Flinging billows of dark steppe earth in fecund
Scatter. At last, emerging onto heathland
My vista widened, bounded on the far
Horizon by whey-thin banks of glossy cloud
Like low-tide sand shoals glimmering with water.
Ankles and knees a’creak, I navigated
The soft-hiss heath grass thankfully, my spirits
Rising after the crowded darkness of
The wood. The view was spacious now, as day
Except in negative. And once, the slant
Of moonlight caught a mist adrift in patches
At wading height above the grass, though faint,
As fresh and bodiless as new-spun cobweb.
Looking back from a high point on the heath,
The bridlepath sank cleave-like through the lignite
Shoulders of the wood, as black as bitumen,
Through which I’d foraged, finally to emerge
Like a big-gilled clamberer from the muddy sea
To gasp a life upon the great dry shore.
And yet, within those woods, like any fish
Wringing its way among the sea’s stiff frond-growth,
I’d found sufficient waymarks to define
Myself and even fancy in extremis
A life spent grubbing in the forest gloom,
Gathering fruits and knitting swathes of ivy
For roof against the piercing rain and hot-eyed
Guerilla fox.
When all is done, to sit
At ease at journey’s end in the village pub
Beyond the heath, refreshed with beer and meat,
A red-tongued fire and loud unwary voices
Fogging the bottle-glass windows, not seeing
The predators who crouch in steel-eyed parley
In shadows, watching doors and bins for chance
To seize the lame or snatch a carcase from
The trash, obscures with hot-juice meats the trek-truth
Those creatures – preying, preyed-upon – present:
The core of being is contingency –
Yes, daily lusts for food and heat but more
Important, that demanding pressure of
The Other, hidden by the howls of laughter
Or frothy chink of glasses but insistent
In turbid forest crannies or on the heath.
Beneath the moon, uncaring arbiter,
And paused for breath within the coal-tar wood,
Sealed by darkness, by silence isolate,
I felt upon my shoulder, on my skin,
Inside the pumping of my heart, a touch,
Objective yet intensely intimate,
Of something underpinning all that is,
Even the rape of bloody flesh from bone
When a frenzied stoat entooths a screaming hare:
Such presence felt in such a dismal place,
Sustaining though impassive as the air,
Which stretches from its otherness to kiss
Its creatures in their bodied life and death!
Contiguous to being, it allures
Response, though how to grasp a hand which hangs
Unseen? The woodland silence under night’s
Old dark starkly surrounds you in that riddle.
Since creatures crawled, the only route from thingness,
Subsumed in that impassible, is limned
By the big-eyed skeleton at rest in the trees’
Litter: night wind and the moon’s chilly light
Polish its smiling, water-hollowed bones.
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©
October 2014
