Monday, 15 June 2020

Night Woods in Fog

In 2013 and 2014 I made quite a number of night walks off-path through deep woods without torch or mobile, basically to see what it was like. This resulted in two long poems, 'The Woods at Night', posted on 13 April 2016, linked here , and 'Wood Trek', posted on 21 November 2018, linked here . The intros to those poems give more information on the conditions under which the walks were made. I thought that was it, but on 1 November 2015 (All Saints Day) a monstrous thick fog descended, just like the good old London pea-soupers those of us of a certain age remember well, and I could not restrain my curiosity to find out what it would be like to trek the woods in the dark and through thickest fog: 'Night Woods in Fog' records the experience. It being All Saints Day I also wrote a short lyric which follows as an addendum at the end of the poem. 

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Sunday 1 November 2015

November heath at twilight and the fog
Is sodden-thick, like wadding stuffed around
The looming gloom of beech and chestnut trees,
Gone vague as distant mountains; vista is
Destroyed, there’s only thick miasma, brown
As rats’ fur, clumping greasily on the grass.
Within that bulging mucous murk, made fawn
And grainy by the orange village lights,
There’s a sound of giggling girls and barking dogs
But nothing seen.
                               In minutes I’m alone,
Walking the metalled track to the incline’s lip
Which sinks into the woods. The village lights
Are distant, fading fast. A racing dog
With winking collar angles through the fog –
A shrouded walker follows with a torch;
They meld into the bilious gloom. My footsteps
Crackle and die. This mild moist night, I sweat.
    The clammy lychgate creaks; I pass into
The woods, descending into coal-black dark.
The leaf-fall crunches underfoot but makes
No difference to the swelling touch-felt silence.
Tramping the sandy bridlepath, night sight
Of sorts develops, though all it manages
Is grey mass told from dark mass; hint and squint
Are used to guess the fog crowding the crowns
Of oak and maple, tamping every fissure
With a sheeny sponge that’s matt and grubby to
The eye. And weird, at waist, outleaning mounds
Of rotting ferns define themselves as grey
And use-blanched dishcloths.
                                                   At the wood’s black depth
I leave the mud-sand path and strike into
The trees; I have the untracked route by heart
But all is changed by the cloud-thick darkness, brewed
By the bundling fog, infilling vistas used
In night sight to adjudge felt place and distance.
And since my last walk leaf drop has occurred
So that a sour-sharp mulch of birch and ash
And oak leaves, shrouding every half-hint waymark,
Has merged with trunk-trapped fog to make a screed
Of indirection that’s unreadable.
Stymied, I search that sludge-like dark for glims
Of fallen birch boughs, used to point my way;
Mole-blind, I miss them, shambling warily
In arcs to find a route; shins, knees and hands
Scour bush and bramble, flesh-stung, till at last
By hope and instinct in that flea-brown sump,
I fetch up panting on a stream’s wet bank.
    As if with cataract, I foot-feel hints
For the double plank across, now lost in leaf-pile
Which also swamps the stream; eventually,
I ease across, toe-led and darkness-blind.
On the far bank with step and step and squint,
I track the stream until the woodfloor slopes
And, thankful to respond, I turn uphill
Through tree stands clogged with solid palls of night
So that sensation is an only guide –
That instinct-memory that shifting masses
Truthfully tell the way. Short-breathed, ache-limbed,
I reach my goal at incline’s top. And stand.
    Such silence, stillness! Nothing moves except –
A constant dripping in the dark-hid crowns
As fog condenses, skeltering to ground
In pocks of sound made sharp and brittle in
The mind as atoms’ blows though nothing’s felt.
There’s whiff of damp, and rotting leaves, and black
Rich earth wetly devouring stalk and twig.
But what’s to see? Only a blackout merged
By looming behemoths of pall on pall;
It's only in arm’s length that eye can tell
Tree trunks or bushes and upended branches,
And those but vaguely. The fog’s unseen, by mind
Divined as a dour puce blanket gripping all
And melding everything to a flat-faced blank.
    I set off back, wielding a foot-found stick
To ward off branches and ankle-trapping roots;
It’s toe-touch work again by prod and step.
At incline’s base the darkness is intense
And forces thought that tramping on such nights
With neither torch nor mobile, doused in fog,
Tempts fate to snap a leg or twist a foot.
Regardless, staggering, I find the stream
And inch across the planks, misfooting at
A crawl the rise back to the forest track.
Such subfusc darkness! Fisting through dense shrouds,
Tripping on sink holes left by roots or fox
Or rabbit dens, my language rips the air.
Then forced to standstill, finding billowed bushes
Clutching my face and arms, brute-mindedly
I thrust a way, accepting wounds, for here’s
No place for stalemate, lost from all direction.
At last I sense a lightening in the murk,
A streak I push towards for that’s the track,
Its sandy bed’s half-glimmer all the help
A man can pray for in this bruising dark.
    Winded, sore-kneed, I gain the path and start
Uphill, seeking the lychgate and the heath.
The path’s vague width bisects the forest crown
And in that cave-black chasm I can glimpse
The obfuscating fog sunk down among
The trees in dust and rubble folds, choking
All sight of clouds or stars or moon. Fatigued,
I scour my hot-skin brow, bemused to find
My hair and skull adrip with condensation
Though dry behind. Likewise my clothes: they’re sheened
At front with dew and chilly-dry at back.
And so the lychgate, after steady walking,
Emerges from the night like off-white bones
Cluttered across the track. I pass its bar
And walking wearily across the heath
I turn to gaze upon the sombre dark
From which I’ve sprung.
                                           I made the walk to feel
The fog’s effect sumped in the night-struck woods,
But found the deeper darkness it imposed
Obscured the fog itself, and monochrome
Miasma, quite impervious, was all
There was to see. Now staring at that wall
Of wood-enfolding black it seems absurd
That for an hour I’ve staggered doggedly
Through tracks and glades, opaque as deep-earth mines,
This night when neither fox nor owl nor stoat
Has stirred or screamed, so stunned has the fog thrown them.
I face about to find the village lights
Pricked dully at track’s end like creatures’ eyes;
The huge phenomenon of fog makes small
My person scuffing on the dusty road:
The plenitude of brick-black billowing,
Tall-reaching to the unseen sky, the merge
Of black, brown, bruise and purple in a thickness
Unbroachable and nitric as bad air,
Cows the night-walker and sends me shuffling to
The village bound where with a final glance
At that wall-thick, brown-depth massif which engulfs
The wood, I turn into the village streets
To lose myself inside their crock of light.

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Addendum for All Saints Day

What sooth man creeps the woods at dark,
Leaf-footing from the forest path,
Alert should night-black bush or tree
Resolve the silence with a mark
Of sound: or did a she-fox laugh?
Oh saints in heaven, pray for me.

In blank-eyed dark, on wet-stenched earth,
Leaf-clutched beneath an oak’s black caul,
What’s crueller than necessity?
A lunge is but a finger’s girth
Away: or did a tree branch fall?
Oh saints in heaven pray for me.

Through soul’s dense fog a way is wrought,
Leaf-troubling like a fever’s dream;
This cloud-damp night provides no key;
A touch on skin, the stumbler caught
His breath: or did a raven scream?
Oh saints in heaven, pray for me.

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Both poems © November 2015