Giles Watson's Blog, page 3
October 24, 2020
Emily Dickinson's 'A Bird came down the Walk' - A Meditation
A Bird came down the Walk –
A meditation by Giles Watson
From the beginning, Dickinson balances the particular and the universal:
“A Bird came down the Walk –”
Or, perhaps, it would be better to say that she finds the universal in the particular. It’s not just “a walk”; it is “the Walk” – perhaps a well-worn path at her home in Amherst. For a poet so precise in her observations, she seems to be at pains, though, not to tell us the species of the Bird; it is just a “Bird”, capitalised, not necessarily one of the Robins that frequent her pages and give her a “criterion for tune” which identifies Dickinson as a New Englander rather than a poet from somewhere else where other species are more common. The intensity of the observation that follows tells us that she is describing a real incident, but she hides the Bird’s identity from us – although “Robin” is not an identity either, at least not for the Bird; it is just a bit of human taxonomy. It is not, however, a vague and amorphous bird. Its actions will be very distinctive and precise. It is at once Everybird, and an individual, self-possessed songbird that came down Dickinson’s walk one day in 1863.
“He did not know I saw –”
That is why he came down the walk so confidently, whether flying or hopping – because he was not aware of being observed. His behaviour is therefore candid and fearless; his coming act of predation is an intensely private one. We know that Dickinson, too, valued her privacy, so much so that sometimes when she had visitors, she would hold conversations with them from an adjoining room, so that they could hear her, but not see her.
“He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,”
It is sudden and gratuitous act of violence, over in fourteen syllables, but even the Angle Worm is not just any old earthworm. He is a “fellow” creature, like the “Narrow Fellow in the Grass” who, in another poem featuring a legless animal, fills Dickinson with the abject thrill of “Zero at the Bone”. Perhaps even predation is an act of fellowship in the animal world – a world of interdependence where all must eat to survive, and where the Worm, one of the great decomposers, must ultimately pull the flesh of the Bird back down into the soil.
“And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass –”
“And then” is so often the structural device that teachers cross out of stories written by children, but here, the phrase is more than simply functional, because Dickinson is describing a methodical process – a ritual, perhaps – through which the bird assists the digestion of the worm. This is also the moment when the particularity of the observation reaches its finest point, and is read as an example in miniscule of nature’s capacity to provide: the Grass which holds the Dew is “convenient”, right there on the Walk, with a droplet imprisoned among the fine hairs of the surface of its leaf.
“And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass –”
After its treatment of the Worm, the Bird is surprisingly courteous to the Beetle. Perhaps it is a distasteful one, or a species that bombards predators with noisome chemicals. Now, we have two human objects in the poem – the Walk and the Wall – both of which the Bird treats with proprietorial confidence. I am finding the Bird’s cockiness very endearing by this stage; the very qualities which are most abhorrent in human beings tend to be delightful in birds.
“He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad –
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. –”
But the Bird is aware that he is on human territory, and so, although he is a predator, all of his seeming overconfidence is framed by fear. Birds’ eyes are fixed in their skulls, so of course, if his eyes “hurried all abroad”, then his whole head is in constant movement, and this draws Dickinson’s attention to the “Velvet” texture of the feathers on his head. We can feel the Bird becoming a personality in Dickinson’s mind. He’s on his guard, and yet he’s missing something: the poet herself, who has captured him so that his nervousness is still alive as I write this a hundred and thirty-seven years later.
Is there a segue after this stanza? I think there may be, because suddenly the Bird is aware of the poet’s presence:
“Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,”
Dickinson usually capitalises her nouns when she wants to imbue them with universal significance, but here it is an adjective: “Cautious”. It is not the Bird who acts like the hunted one, but the poet who is “Like one in danger”, making a humble offering. Perhaps Dickinson has been habituating the Bird to her presence since the incident with the Angle Worm. Perhaps, too, the Bird would prefer something “raw”, because it seems to eschew the “Crumb”:
“And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer Home –”
We are reminded that the Bird had been an emissary from the natural world, and that Dickinson’s Walk is not his “Home”, and it is no coincidence that the moment of the poet’s epiphany comes as the Bird flees away from culture and back into nature in a flurry of flight. It is at this point, too, that Dickinson’s language launches out on its own flight of what might in the mid-nineteenth century have been called “fancy”. The beginning of this disconnection from the particular is in the verb, “rowed”. Air is becoming liquid. He rows Home softer:
“Than Oars divide the Ocean
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.”
At the centre of the poem are miniscule globes of similar size: the droplet of water borne up on the Grass, and the Bird’s eyes, but as Dickinson remarked once in a letter, “My business is circumference.” We have just taken flight with Dickinson, and are now in orbit at the circumference, participating in the universal, in the softness of the flight of birds and butterflies, or in the motion of oars that leave no splash. It is a vision of seeming effortlessness, although, of course, the Bird’s sudden burst into the sublime has been powered by the digestion of the Worm.
As I write this, I am thinking of dog-walkers who do not bring leads with them when they visit one of our local harbour beaches, which has a sanctuary for wading birds at one end of it. When a dog runs among the red-necked stints and golden plovers, it sets them into patterns of flight which are the purest poetry. The impression is one of sublime effortlessness, and it is only amplified by the plaintive wildness of the birds’ alarm-calls. But unlike the sedentary Bird in Dickinson’s poem, these are birds which have flown thousands of miles to get here, and which must now eat with an obsessive desperation in order to regain the condition required to fly thousands of miles back again. Each seemingly effortless rowing into flight occasioned by the arrival of a dog on the roosting beach robs the birds of essential resources which enable them to accomplish one of the most miraculous feats of navigation in the natural world.
We cannot appreciate the glories of circumference if we do not cater for our basic needs at the centre. The bird that cannot find the Angle Worm does not row “softer Home”; it dies of starvation. Our own spirituality, and our own experience of the Sublime, is only available to us once we have met our basic needs at the centre, and our basic needs include the conservation of the other species that inhabit our planet. One of the reasons why Dickinson’s poetry becomes more, not less, relevant in the modern world is because our own spirituality is being impoverished as we subject the natural world to deprivation, disruption and destruction. We are the ones who are disrupting the fellowship of living species– the innate understanding between predator and prey – because we prey on everything indiscriminately. Perhaps the motivation for doing something to reverse the processes of mass-extinction must be found in the experience Dickinson articulates in that last sentence of her poem: more people will be inspired to conserve nature when they pause for long enough to observe its glories – even its minor ones: the velvet head of a bird, the welling dew on the grass. But before it can fly, the Bird must eat its Angle Worm. Poison all the worms, and there will be no Sublime. If we want to experience the universal, we must care for the particular more than ever. We must offer the Crumb.
A meditation by Giles Watson
From the beginning, Dickinson balances the particular and the universal:
“A Bird came down the Walk –”
Or, perhaps, it would be better to say that she finds the universal in the particular. It’s not just “a walk”; it is “the Walk” – perhaps a well-worn path at her home in Amherst. For a poet so precise in her observations, she seems to be at pains, though, not to tell us the species of the Bird; it is just a “Bird”, capitalised, not necessarily one of the Robins that frequent her pages and give her a “criterion for tune” which identifies Dickinson as a New Englander rather than a poet from somewhere else where other species are more common. The intensity of the observation that follows tells us that she is describing a real incident, but she hides the Bird’s identity from us – although “Robin” is not an identity either, at least not for the Bird; it is just a bit of human taxonomy. It is not, however, a vague and amorphous bird. Its actions will be very distinctive and precise. It is at once Everybird, and an individual, self-possessed songbird that came down Dickinson’s walk one day in 1863.
“He did not know I saw –”
That is why he came down the walk so confidently, whether flying or hopping – because he was not aware of being observed. His behaviour is therefore candid and fearless; his coming act of predation is an intensely private one. We know that Dickinson, too, valued her privacy, so much so that sometimes when she had visitors, she would hold conversations with them from an adjoining room, so that they could hear her, but not see her.
“He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,”
It is sudden and gratuitous act of violence, over in fourteen syllables, but even the Angle Worm is not just any old earthworm. He is a “fellow” creature, like the “Narrow Fellow in the Grass” who, in another poem featuring a legless animal, fills Dickinson with the abject thrill of “Zero at the Bone”. Perhaps even predation is an act of fellowship in the animal world – a world of interdependence where all must eat to survive, and where the Worm, one of the great decomposers, must ultimately pull the flesh of the Bird back down into the soil.
“And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass –”
“And then” is so often the structural device that teachers cross out of stories written by children, but here, the phrase is more than simply functional, because Dickinson is describing a methodical process – a ritual, perhaps – through which the bird assists the digestion of the worm. This is also the moment when the particularity of the observation reaches its finest point, and is read as an example in miniscule of nature’s capacity to provide: the Grass which holds the Dew is “convenient”, right there on the Walk, with a droplet imprisoned among the fine hairs of the surface of its leaf.
“And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass –”
After its treatment of the Worm, the Bird is surprisingly courteous to the Beetle. Perhaps it is a distasteful one, or a species that bombards predators with noisome chemicals. Now, we have two human objects in the poem – the Walk and the Wall – both of which the Bird treats with proprietorial confidence. I am finding the Bird’s cockiness very endearing by this stage; the very qualities which are most abhorrent in human beings tend to be delightful in birds.
“He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad –
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. –”
But the Bird is aware that he is on human territory, and so, although he is a predator, all of his seeming overconfidence is framed by fear. Birds’ eyes are fixed in their skulls, so of course, if his eyes “hurried all abroad”, then his whole head is in constant movement, and this draws Dickinson’s attention to the “Velvet” texture of the feathers on his head. We can feel the Bird becoming a personality in Dickinson’s mind. He’s on his guard, and yet he’s missing something: the poet herself, who has captured him so that his nervousness is still alive as I write this a hundred and thirty-seven years later.
Is there a segue after this stanza? I think there may be, because suddenly the Bird is aware of the poet’s presence:
“Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,”
Dickinson usually capitalises her nouns when she wants to imbue them with universal significance, but here it is an adjective: “Cautious”. It is not the Bird who acts like the hunted one, but the poet who is “Like one in danger”, making a humble offering. Perhaps Dickinson has been habituating the Bird to her presence since the incident with the Angle Worm. Perhaps, too, the Bird would prefer something “raw”, because it seems to eschew the “Crumb”:
“And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer Home –”
We are reminded that the Bird had been an emissary from the natural world, and that Dickinson’s Walk is not his “Home”, and it is no coincidence that the moment of the poet’s epiphany comes as the Bird flees away from culture and back into nature in a flurry of flight. It is at this point, too, that Dickinson’s language launches out on its own flight of what might in the mid-nineteenth century have been called “fancy”. The beginning of this disconnection from the particular is in the verb, “rowed”. Air is becoming liquid. He rows Home softer:
“Than Oars divide the Ocean
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.”
At the centre of the poem are miniscule globes of similar size: the droplet of water borne up on the Grass, and the Bird’s eyes, but as Dickinson remarked once in a letter, “My business is circumference.” We have just taken flight with Dickinson, and are now in orbit at the circumference, participating in the universal, in the softness of the flight of birds and butterflies, or in the motion of oars that leave no splash. It is a vision of seeming effortlessness, although, of course, the Bird’s sudden burst into the sublime has been powered by the digestion of the Worm.
As I write this, I am thinking of dog-walkers who do not bring leads with them when they visit one of our local harbour beaches, which has a sanctuary for wading birds at one end of it. When a dog runs among the red-necked stints and golden plovers, it sets them into patterns of flight which are the purest poetry. The impression is one of sublime effortlessness, and it is only amplified by the plaintive wildness of the birds’ alarm-calls. But unlike the sedentary Bird in Dickinson’s poem, these are birds which have flown thousands of miles to get here, and which must now eat with an obsessive desperation in order to regain the condition required to fly thousands of miles back again. Each seemingly effortless rowing into flight occasioned by the arrival of a dog on the roosting beach robs the birds of essential resources which enable them to accomplish one of the most miraculous feats of navigation in the natural world.
We cannot appreciate the glories of circumference if we do not cater for our basic needs at the centre. The bird that cannot find the Angle Worm does not row “softer Home”; it dies of starvation. Our own spirituality, and our own experience of the Sublime, is only available to us once we have met our basic needs at the centre, and our basic needs include the conservation of the other species that inhabit our planet. One of the reasons why Dickinson’s poetry becomes more, not less, relevant in the modern world is because our own spirituality is being impoverished as we subject the natural world to deprivation, disruption and destruction. We are the ones who are disrupting the fellowship of living species– the innate understanding between predator and prey – because we prey on everything indiscriminately. Perhaps the motivation for doing something to reverse the processes of mass-extinction must be found in the experience Dickinson articulates in that last sentence of her poem: more people will be inspired to conserve nature when they pause for long enough to observe its glories – even its minor ones: the velvet head of a bird, the welling dew on the grass. But before it can fly, the Bird must eat its Angle Worm. Poison all the worms, and there will be no Sublime. If we want to experience the universal, we must care for the particular more than ever. We must offer the Crumb.
October 18, 2020
Emily Dickinson's 'Much Madness is divinest sense': a meditation
‘Much Madness is divinest sense’
A Meditation
Giles Watson
‘Much Madness is divinest sense’ might be a poem written for our times, commenting as it does on the savagery of social capital. Perhaps Emily Dickinson has in mind the social pressure she came under at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where the girls were encouraged to profess their Christian faith, and she could not. Or perhaps it is just a reflection on the social stigma she no doubt experienced in choosing to remain unmarried, and to make poetry her highest priority.
“Much Madness is divinest Sense
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness – ”
The “Madness” is there in that “obsessive-compulsive” perfection: the patterns of alliteration, anaphora and antithesis, because who cares about those things except poets, right? Amid all the bonkers spin bilged out by politicians, all the tabulated economics, all the twittering of gossip, the poet sits slant-rhyming in ballad metre, the one still thing in the maelstrom of wasted words, quietly ordering and assembling the words that matter. She’s mad - she must be - because she’s doing it alone - making sense of sound - taking the trouble to discern whilst elsewhere language is gratuitously, obscenely, blasphemously mangled. “Leverage” becomes a verb. “Look” comes at the beginning of every answer, so that each retort is a power-play. Verbal back-stabs are prefaced with “To be honest,...” “Covfefe” goes viral.
Shine a light on the poet in this darkness. There she is: starkers, stripped of pretensions, wearing nothing but her discipline, working with words as though they still had sacred meaning.
“‘Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –”
... because that’s what “Madness” is: being different, not belonging to the majority, and not conforming to its whims and fashions. Only the majority gets to decide who is mad: whoever is not them.
“Assent - and you are sane –”
The majority want your assent. They demand it. It’s easy to give it. Go on. Say the “sinner’s prayer” even though you don’t feel it. It’s expected of you. Beyond this artificiality lies rapid social advancement. Assent. Assent. Assent. Sing the National Anthem, even though every word of it insults the original inhabitants of this land. Assent. Assent. Assent. Read that advertisement and then go and buy the product. Tell your friends about it. Make them buy it, too. Assent. Assent. Assent. Stick to the script. Play the role your sex and class and race and hair colour and age dictates that you must play. Assent. Assent. Assent. Toe the line, and you’re sane.
“Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain –”
Dickinson wrote this in the context of a national war to purge the United States of slavery. It was a world, too, in which animals were shackled, and travelling circuses paraded their captives - intelligent apes, tortured elephants - in chains. Social disobedience regularly met with a lashing. But most homes had their own internal, metaphorical shackles. Dickinson herself had to miss sleep in the small hours of the morning just in order to write. Household drudgery was the Chain.
If you don’t assent, it will be necessary for them to handle you. Poets are hard to handle. They’re too quiet. They prioritise strange things. They might write a satire about you. They might write something which you don’t know how to interpret. They might be mocking you. Worse, they might care more about their words than your social capital. That’s where the Chain comes in useful.
I demur, and I’m straightway dangerous. But I’m damned if I’ll let myself be handled - least of all with a Chain. They didn’t get to handle Dickinson, either - not ultimately. They published hardly any of her poems in her lifetime, and those they did, they “edited”, maiming them with titles and replacing the dashes with “advanced punctuation”. But it’s not their poems I can go online to read now, from photographs of the carefully preserved manuscripts. It’s not their poems that are loved and taught across the world. They assented, and drifted into obscurity. Dickinson demurred.
A Meditation
Giles Watson
‘Much Madness is divinest sense’ might be a poem written for our times, commenting as it does on the savagery of social capital. Perhaps Emily Dickinson has in mind the social pressure she came under at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where the girls were encouraged to profess their Christian faith, and she could not. Or perhaps it is just a reflection on the social stigma she no doubt experienced in choosing to remain unmarried, and to make poetry her highest priority.
“Much Madness is divinest Sense
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness – ”
The “Madness” is there in that “obsessive-compulsive” perfection: the patterns of alliteration, anaphora and antithesis, because who cares about those things except poets, right? Amid all the bonkers spin bilged out by politicians, all the tabulated economics, all the twittering of gossip, the poet sits slant-rhyming in ballad metre, the one still thing in the maelstrom of wasted words, quietly ordering and assembling the words that matter. She’s mad - she must be - because she’s doing it alone - making sense of sound - taking the trouble to discern whilst elsewhere language is gratuitously, obscenely, blasphemously mangled. “Leverage” becomes a verb. “Look” comes at the beginning of every answer, so that each retort is a power-play. Verbal back-stabs are prefaced with “To be honest,...” “Covfefe” goes viral.
Shine a light on the poet in this darkness. There she is: starkers, stripped of pretensions, wearing nothing but her discipline, working with words as though they still had sacred meaning.
“‘Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –”
... because that’s what “Madness” is: being different, not belonging to the majority, and not conforming to its whims and fashions. Only the majority gets to decide who is mad: whoever is not them.
“Assent - and you are sane –”
The majority want your assent. They demand it. It’s easy to give it. Go on. Say the “sinner’s prayer” even though you don’t feel it. It’s expected of you. Beyond this artificiality lies rapid social advancement. Assent. Assent. Assent. Sing the National Anthem, even though every word of it insults the original inhabitants of this land. Assent. Assent. Assent. Read that advertisement and then go and buy the product. Tell your friends about it. Make them buy it, too. Assent. Assent. Assent. Stick to the script. Play the role your sex and class and race and hair colour and age dictates that you must play. Assent. Assent. Assent. Toe the line, and you’re sane.
“Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain –”
Dickinson wrote this in the context of a national war to purge the United States of slavery. It was a world, too, in which animals were shackled, and travelling circuses paraded their captives - intelligent apes, tortured elephants - in chains. Social disobedience regularly met with a lashing. But most homes had their own internal, metaphorical shackles. Dickinson herself had to miss sleep in the small hours of the morning just in order to write. Household drudgery was the Chain.
If you don’t assent, it will be necessary for them to handle you. Poets are hard to handle. They’re too quiet. They prioritise strange things. They might write a satire about you. They might write something which you don’t know how to interpret. They might be mocking you. Worse, they might care more about their words than your social capital. That’s where the Chain comes in useful.
I demur, and I’m straightway dangerous. But I’m damned if I’ll let myself be handled - least of all with a Chain. They didn’t get to handle Dickinson, either - not ultimately. They published hardly any of her poems in her lifetime, and those they did, they “edited”, maiming them with titles and replacing the dashes with “advanced punctuation”. But it’s not their poems I can go online to read now, from photographs of the carefully preserved manuscripts. It’s not their poems that are loved and taught across the world. They assented, and drifted into obscurity. Dickinson demurred.
Emily Dickinson's 'Split the Lark': a meditation
‘Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music –’
A Meditation
Giles Watson
‘Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music –’ is a poem which calls me back time and time again, because like its ostensible subject, its multiple layers of meaning defy dissection.
Many readers are familiar with the interpretation which is based on the most overt meaning of the poem: you can’t use empirical science as a means of getting to the bottom of natural beauty; all you will succeed in doing is killing the beauty at its source. Thomas the Apostle, doubting that Jesus was resurrected, would only believe what he had been told when he was able to stick his fingers into the gash in his teacher’s chest where the spear had pierced it. We, in our arrogance, run the risk of flooding the world in the blood of our scarlet experiments if we seek to explain everything that seems miraculous.
It should be pointed out straight away that Emily Dickinson was not an enemy of science. Other poems of hers point to the fact that sometimes it is the only thing that can be trusted. She was also an agnostic. So, the poem cannot really be read - if we are to read it on her terms - as a defence of faith against reason, but it certainly can be read in the following ways.
It can be read as a defence of nature against exploitation and cruelty. It advocates the impulsive reading of art and literature against a dissecting criticism. It is an exhortation to revel in immediate, transitory joys that cannot be preserved in aspic or kept in formaldehyde inside a museum. And, perhaps, it is a celebration of the organic in birds, in women, and in all of nature.
Let’s enjoy it line by line:
“Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music”
Of course, you won’t. You’ll find its trachaea, its gizzard, its breastbone, its liver and intestines. You’ll even uncover its larynx, but you won’t tease out the music that whistled through it. You’ll find its brain, but not the thought or impulse that drove the bird to sing. And yes, we’re dealing with an empirical lark on a marble slab, but we are also dealing with a universal one, because Dickinson has capitalised it and its Music. You won’t explain the impulse to song or joy or creativity by killing and dissecting anything, although you may learn many other things about how a body works. Nor will you find the answer to any other question about beauty or art. You can dissect a poem, as I am doing now, and the time spent reflecting and understanding may increase your appreciation, but the impulse - the spark that drove the poet and delights the reader - is in something else. It fled the room the moment you sunk in the scalpel.
“Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled –”
I think of the bird’s organs in those “bulbs”, but also the bulbs of daffodils, and because I am a post-twentieth century reader, I think of light-bulbs. They are repositories of something - life, growth, light - but disconnect them and they die instantly. Dissected organs really can gleam like silver, and I can certainly read it on that level. Or perhaps the “silver” is the memory of the bird’s voice. There’s another more horrific interpretation, too. It’s not just a couple of bulbs that are revealed when the Lark is split. It’s “Bulb after Bulb”. They spill out in a chain, or on a string, like the proventriculus, oesophagus, gizzard and intestines of a real bird, along with all the other organs that are attached to these by ducts. Once you are through the feathers and the skin, you become committed to the entire process of spilling. It’s a bloodbath, punctuated by the bulges of half-submerged organs.
“Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear, when Lutes be old -”
It’s going to be a lot scanter now, because the bird is necessarily dead, and the melody can only be “saved” in the memory - at least until Edison appears on the scene. And speaking of Edison, Dickinson is living in the age of invention - a little earlier than the gramophone or the light bulb, but not too early to see what the inventions of the Civil War did to human bodies.
“Loose the Flood - you shall find it patent -”
Patent means “obvious, undeniable”, of course, but there is also still the rush, to this day, to patent inventions and scientific discoveries, so much so that governments are now falling over backwards to invest in whichever company is most likely to discover a vaccine for the Coronavirus. But we are also back there with Noah and his Flood, trying to stave off the whole deluge of human perfidy and presumption. Our impulse to enquire and to explore leads to great discoveries, but it is also helping us to unleash a deluge of destruction.
“Gush after Gush, reserved for you -”
Nineteenth century poets were fond of extolling the beauties of the songs of nightingales, thrushes, skylarks and other songbirds, but it isn’t the song that is gushing here - it is the bird’s blood. Or perhaps it’s the other juices that are necessary components and by-products of life: the bodily fluids which trigger abject responses in some, but without which we cannot have life, reproduction or creativity. Why “reserved”? Perhaps because these juices are really sacred, as even the Christian tradition concedes when it reserves the sacrament - and Catholics genuflect out of respect for the body and blood. Dickinson was brought up in Puritan Protestant traditions, which spiritualised these ideas rather than enacting them literally, but she would have heard, at any communion service she attended, the Biblical affirmation that Christ’s body was broken, and his blood spilt for her. Why, I wonder, does the Christian tradition zero in on that particular gush of blood and water from the side of Christ, rather than his mother’s menstrual blood and amniotic fluid? I wonder, too, whether Dickinson wondered the same thing. Isn’t it strange how the word “gushing”, used as a participle, has a slightly misogynistic tinge? Does a man ever “gush”? What causes this bird to gush blood as it once gushed song? Penetration by a scalpel. This gouges down to the soggy components which culminated in song, but the song is long gone. By this stage, I don’t like the second person in this poem. I can guess that his gender is male, and that as a person who, in the words of another poet, feels he must “murder to dissect”, he does not deserve to have the bird’s song, secrets or sacraments reserved for him.
“Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!”
And like all such arrogant experiments, the result is a gruesome bloodbath. Thomas has dipped his hand in, and it re-emerges dripping with gore. The bird which sang so gloriously is left a bloody pulp. Or, perhaps, in dissecting to find the source of beauty, the purist is shocked to discover that creativity springs unbidden out of the sloppy, organic soup that has always elicited that abject response. The bird’s song arises out of blood and guts and gristle. Human life, and the love and creativity that grows out of it, is blood, mucus, saliva, semen, lymph. But it is something more.
“Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?”
And the thing is that the Bird was always true. Truth is a rare commodity these days, and it is often openly mocked. “True” has all sorts of connotations, stretching back to the days of chivalry: faithfulness, integrity, an unswerving devotion. It also means that the bird used to sing in tune, in contrast with the radical discordance of its dissection. Like Jesus, it seems to acquiesce in its own betrayal and mutilation, and in doing so, it defeats the whole process. It has been dismantled, and the post-mortem never explained its song. The man with the scalpel stands bloodied, guilty and none the wiser. He hasn’t plumbed the depths of anything, except his own inadequacy.
Why, every time I read this poem, do I end by envisaging the pulp coalescing back into a Lark, Phoenix-like in its resurrection, and flying in the dissector’s face? I think it’s because that last question is rhetorical, and because, unlike many of Dickinson’s poems which end deliberately unresolved in a dash, this one pointedly gives us a question mark. It is the dissector who now has to answer for his actions.
Or perhaps it’s because the whole thing was hypothetical anyway. You’ll never catch a lark in the act of song; it’s up there - a tiny, bobbing speck in an endless sky. It wasn’t, “You have split the Lark, so you’ll find the Music”. The whole thing was a sarcastic taunt from the beginning. You can maim nature, but you will never truly triumph over it. You will never triumph over your own organic status. You can’t kill a poem by doing what I have just done to this one. You can’t find the music and bottle it, any more than you can kill God. It flew before you even touched it with the blade.
A Meditation
Giles Watson
‘Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music –’ is a poem which calls me back time and time again, because like its ostensible subject, its multiple layers of meaning defy dissection.
Many readers are familiar with the interpretation which is based on the most overt meaning of the poem: you can’t use empirical science as a means of getting to the bottom of natural beauty; all you will succeed in doing is killing the beauty at its source. Thomas the Apostle, doubting that Jesus was resurrected, would only believe what he had been told when he was able to stick his fingers into the gash in his teacher’s chest where the spear had pierced it. We, in our arrogance, run the risk of flooding the world in the blood of our scarlet experiments if we seek to explain everything that seems miraculous.
It should be pointed out straight away that Emily Dickinson was not an enemy of science. Other poems of hers point to the fact that sometimes it is the only thing that can be trusted. She was also an agnostic. So, the poem cannot really be read - if we are to read it on her terms - as a defence of faith against reason, but it certainly can be read in the following ways.
It can be read as a defence of nature against exploitation and cruelty. It advocates the impulsive reading of art and literature against a dissecting criticism. It is an exhortation to revel in immediate, transitory joys that cannot be preserved in aspic or kept in formaldehyde inside a museum. And, perhaps, it is a celebration of the organic in birds, in women, and in all of nature.
Let’s enjoy it line by line:
“Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music”
Of course, you won’t. You’ll find its trachaea, its gizzard, its breastbone, its liver and intestines. You’ll even uncover its larynx, but you won’t tease out the music that whistled through it. You’ll find its brain, but not the thought or impulse that drove the bird to sing. And yes, we’re dealing with an empirical lark on a marble slab, but we are also dealing with a universal one, because Dickinson has capitalised it and its Music. You won’t explain the impulse to song or joy or creativity by killing and dissecting anything, although you may learn many other things about how a body works. Nor will you find the answer to any other question about beauty or art. You can dissect a poem, as I am doing now, and the time spent reflecting and understanding may increase your appreciation, but the impulse - the spark that drove the poet and delights the reader - is in something else. It fled the room the moment you sunk in the scalpel.
“Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled –”
I think of the bird’s organs in those “bulbs”, but also the bulbs of daffodils, and because I am a post-twentieth century reader, I think of light-bulbs. They are repositories of something - life, growth, light - but disconnect them and they die instantly. Dissected organs really can gleam like silver, and I can certainly read it on that level. Or perhaps the “silver” is the memory of the bird’s voice. There’s another more horrific interpretation, too. It’s not just a couple of bulbs that are revealed when the Lark is split. It’s “Bulb after Bulb”. They spill out in a chain, or on a string, like the proventriculus, oesophagus, gizzard and intestines of a real bird, along with all the other organs that are attached to these by ducts. Once you are through the feathers and the skin, you become committed to the entire process of spilling. It’s a bloodbath, punctuated by the bulges of half-submerged organs.
“Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear, when Lutes be old -”
It’s going to be a lot scanter now, because the bird is necessarily dead, and the melody can only be “saved” in the memory - at least until Edison appears on the scene. And speaking of Edison, Dickinson is living in the age of invention - a little earlier than the gramophone or the light bulb, but not too early to see what the inventions of the Civil War did to human bodies.
“Loose the Flood - you shall find it patent -”
Patent means “obvious, undeniable”, of course, but there is also still the rush, to this day, to patent inventions and scientific discoveries, so much so that governments are now falling over backwards to invest in whichever company is most likely to discover a vaccine for the Coronavirus. But we are also back there with Noah and his Flood, trying to stave off the whole deluge of human perfidy and presumption. Our impulse to enquire and to explore leads to great discoveries, but it is also helping us to unleash a deluge of destruction.
“Gush after Gush, reserved for you -”
Nineteenth century poets were fond of extolling the beauties of the songs of nightingales, thrushes, skylarks and other songbirds, but it isn’t the song that is gushing here - it is the bird’s blood. Or perhaps it’s the other juices that are necessary components and by-products of life: the bodily fluids which trigger abject responses in some, but without which we cannot have life, reproduction or creativity. Why “reserved”? Perhaps because these juices are really sacred, as even the Christian tradition concedes when it reserves the sacrament - and Catholics genuflect out of respect for the body and blood. Dickinson was brought up in Puritan Protestant traditions, which spiritualised these ideas rather than enacting them literally, but she would have heard, at any communion service she attended, the Biblical affirmation that Christ’s body was broken, and his blood spilt for her. Why, I wonder, does the Christian tradition zero in on that particular gush of blood and water from the side of Christ, rather than his mother’s menstrual blood and amniotic fluid? I wonder, too, whether Dickinson wondered the same thing. Isn’t it strange how the word “gushing”, used as a participle, has a slightly misogynistic tinge? Does a man ever “gush”? What causes this bird to gush blood as it once gushed song? Penetration by a scalpel. This gouges down to the soggy components which culminated in song, but the song is long gone. By this stage, I don’t like the second person in this poem. I can guess that his gender is male, and that as a person who, in the words of another poet, feels he must “murder to dissect”, he does not deserve to have the bird’s song, secrets or sacraments reserved for him.
“Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!”
And like all such arrogant experiments, the result is a gruesome bloodbath. Thomas has dipped his hand in, and it re-emerges dripping with gore. The bird which sang so gloriously is left a bloody pulp. Or, perhaps, in dissecting to find the source of beauty, the purist is shocked to discover that creativity springs unbidden out of the sloppy, organic soup that has always elicited that abject response. The bird’s song arises out of blood and guts and gristle. Human life, and the love and creativity that grows out of it, is blood, mucus, saliva, semen, lymph. But it is something more.
“Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?”
And the thing is that the Bird was always true. Truth is a rare commodity these days, and it is often openly mocked. “True” has all sorts of connotations, stretching back to the days of chivalry: faithfulness, integrity, an unswerving devotion. It also means that the bird used to sing in tune, in contrast with the radical discordance of its dissection. Like Jesus, it seems to acquiesce in its own betrayal and mutilation, and in doing so, it defeats the whole process. It has been dismantled, and the post-mortem never explained its song. The man with the scalpel stands bloodied, guilty and none the wiser. He hasn’t plumbed the depths of anything, except his own inadequacy.
Why, every time I read this poem, do I end by envisaging the pulp coalescing back into a Lark, Phoenix-like in its resurrection, and flying in the dissector’s face? I think it’s because that last question is rhetorical, and because, unlike many of Dickinson’s poems which end deliberately unresolved in a dash, this one pointedly gives us a question mark. It is the dissector who now has to answer for his actions.
Or perhaps it’s because the whole thing was hypothetical anyway. You’ll never catch a lark in the act of song; it’s up there - a tiny, bobbing speck in an endless sky. It wasn’t, “You have split the Lark, so you’ll find the Music”. The whole thing was a sarcastic taunt from the beginning. You can maim nature, but you will never truly triumph over it. You will never triumph over your own organic status. You can’t kill a poem by doing what I have just done to this one. You can’t find the music and bottle it, any more than you can kill God. It flew before you even touched it with the blade.
August 26, 2020
Review of The Green Pulse
A lovely review by Alison Ross of my book of poems with paintings by John Lincoln, The Green Pulse.
The Green Pulse
The Green Pulse, a book that celebrates trees in all their convoluted glory, is one of Giles Watson's many collaborative efforts with the gifted visual artist John Lincoln. This is an ekphrastic exercise, and the idea is that the poems directly mirror the paintings, to the point that it becomes almost a symbiotic situation where neither image nor verse can have a solid solo existence. Sure, technically you could read the poems separately or view the art on its own - and each experience would be a rewarding one - but when verse and visual are taken together, the impact is doubled, or, rather, deepened.
John Lincoln's paintings saturate the senses, and Giles' verse feeds back into the sensory saturation, weaving lush description with narrative imaginings. For example, in the poem, "The Corner Tree," he writes, "Here at the field's edge, the tree is dancing, full of xylem and phloem, her cleft bole glowing." Later in the poem, the narrator proclaims, "I can only stand, exult, cry out at her golden vortex, as she drinks, thick as syrup, the honeycombed sun."
This approach seems to mimic John Lincoln's own approach to painting the trees, for his trees are not merely representational, but, rather, have symbolic qualities that suggest something outside or beyond themselves. True, these arboreal creations are mostly recognizable as trees, but John Lincoln portrays them as wildly colorful, fantastical, and mystical creatures, with sentience, seemingly, as they appear to feel pain, joy, and the whole spectrum of emotions.
Certainly both Giles and John want us to see trees as extensions of ourselves, as metaphysical metaphors for our own lives. In "Fen Thorn," Giles writes, "... a thorn tree squatted, almost leafless, a half-known form that played upon my mind: not quite the thorn I knew, for I went loveless...and something in my soul was turning lifeless: a nest of tangled dreams and spent desires." Here, the poet shows us how a nest of thorns can represent both harsh beauty as well as our own frustrated aspirations.
"The Singing Tree" is perhaps the centerpiece of the collection, insofar as it is a lyrical lament beautifully executed. The musical verse evokes the rhythmic limbs of the tree in the painting, which become twisted around in a tangled tango, and the wispy swirls and streams of light flow melodically around the tree base.
All types of trees are catalogued here, and notes at the end give some scientific details about the trees and also discuss the inspirations for both poet and artist, which give an added, if more sobering, dimension to these otherwise sensual and synaesthetic collaborations.
Both Giles Watson and John Lincoln are avid nature-lovers who revel in imparting their passion to others, so that we too may feel fused with trees, the natural world's most precious gift. As Giles writes, "I lean out, reach for silence, and the tree is towering, the locus of my dreaming. I let go, blend with silence, and the tree is looming, the woodland gleaming once more into being."
The Green Pulse
The Green Pulse, a book that celebrates trees in all their convoluted glory, is one of Giles Watson's many collaborative efforts with the gifted visual artist John Lincoln. This is an ekphrastic exercise, and the idea is that the poems directly mirror the paintings, to the point that it becomes almost a symbiotic situation where neither image nor verse can have a solid solo existence. Sure, technically you could read the poems separately or view the art on its own - and each experience would be a rewarding one - but when verse and visual are taken together, the impact is doubled, or, rather, deepened.
John Lincoln's paintings saturate the senses, and Giles' verse feeds back into the sensory saturation, weaving lush description with narrative imaginings. For example, in the poem, "The Corner Tree," he writes, "Here at the field's edge, the tree is dancing, full of xylem and phloem, her cleft bole glowing." Later in the poem, the narrator proclaims, "I can only stand, exult, cry out at her golden vortex, as she drinks, thick as syrup, the honeycombed sun."
This approach seems to mimic John Lincoln's own approach to painting the trees, for his trees are not merely representational, but, rather, have symbolic qualities that suggest something outside or beyond themselves. True, these arboreal creations are mostly recognizable as trees, but John Lincoln portrays them as wildly colorful, fantastical, and mystical creatures, with sentience, seemingly, as they appear to feel pain, joy, and the whole spectrum of emotions.
Certainly both Giles and John want us to see trees as extensions of ourselves, as metaphysical metaphors for our own lives. In "Fen Thorn," Giles writes, "... a thorn tree squatted, almost leafless, a half-known form that played upon my mind: not quite the thorn I knew, for I went loveless...and something in my soul was turning lifeless: a nest of tangled dreams and spent desires." Here, the poet shows us how a nest of thorns can represent both harsh beauty as well as our own frustrated aspirations.
"The Singing Tree" is perhaps the centerpiece of the collection, insofar as it is a lyrical lament beautifully executed. The musical verse evokes the rhythmic limbs of the tree in the painting, which become twisted around in a tangled tango, and the wispy swirls and streams of light flow melodically around the tree base.
All types of trees are catalogued here, and notes at the end give some scientific details about the trees and also discuss the inspirations for both poet and artist, which give an added, if more sobering, dimension to these otherwise sensual and synaesthetic collaborations.
Both Giles Watson and John Lincoln are avid nature-lovers who revel in imparting their passion to others, so that we too may feel fused with trees, the natural world's most precious gift. As Giles writes, "I lean out, reach for silence, and the tree is towering, the locus of my dreaming. I let go, blend with silence, and the tree is looming, the woodland gleaming once more into being."
August 18, 2020
The Flight of the White Horse: Second Edition
I first published The Flight of the White Horse in 2012. It is a sequence of poems in praise of a landscape I love, in the form of an imagined journey of the Bronze Age White Horse of Uffington through the night sky from her home above Dragon Hill, down the ancient Ridgeway to Avebury, with a significant diversion into Dorset. Along the way, she encounters Neolithic chambered tombs, Iron Age hillforts, the largest human-constructed mound apart from the pyramids, the cradle of agricultural civilisation in Britain, other hill-figures, and the enormous henge and stone circle which encompasses the village of Avebury. I decided that it would be fitting to illustrate the written text with chalk pastel drawings, and I even used a little bit of Ridgeway chalk in the cover picture.
My printer managed to completely lose the first edition of the book in a recent site upgrade, but this turned out to be a fortuitous error, because I have now made this second edition, which has more space for the illustrations and text, and is printed on better paper. The text remains largely the same, except that the gender of the White Horse has been changed, and I feel much happier with the way it is now. The notes at the end are somewhat expanded. If anyone would like to sample it, I will share a reading of the old version of the text in the comments below.
I used to be able to see the Uffington White Horse out of my bedroom window in winter when the leaves were off the trees, and I spent countless hours out in her landscape with my dog Pryderi in those happy years, so this poem will always have a place in my heart.
https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/giles...
My printer managed to completely lose the first edition of the book in a recent site upgrade, but this turned out to be a fortuitous error, because I have now made this second edition, which has more space for the illustrations and text, and is printed on better paper. The text remains largely the same, except that the gender of the White Horse has been changed, and I feel much happier with the way it is now. The notes at the end are somewhat expanded. If anyone would like to sample it, I will share a reading of the old version of the text in the comments below.
I used to be able to see the Uffington White Horse out of my bedroom window in winter when the leaves were off the trees, and I spent countless hours out in her landscape with my dog Pryderi in those happy years, so this poem will always have a place in my heart.
https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/giles...
August 8, 2020
Collaborations with John Lincoln
This little playlist includes a small selection of the poems I have written during my long-term collaboration with the Lincolnshire artist, John Lincoln:
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=P...
Links to our books on Goodreads:
A Burnished Echo
The Fen-Gazer
The Green Pulse
Avian Dreams
A Symphony of Leaves
Myriad Circles
A Secret Garden
Here is the essay I wrote as a preface to another book of John Lincoln's paintings, at the beginning of our association. It recounts a visit to his studio in the Lincolnshire Fens:
“Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves” :
nature and spirit in the art of John Lincoln
Giles Watson
To walk into John Lincoln’s studio is to pass, in a heightened state of awareness, by the borders of an ancient wood on the edge of undrained fen, as a low sun slants across the landscape and turns the leaves translucent. There is a warmth and a vibrancy of colour which heighten this sense of epiphany, and I am reminded irresistibly of the moment beside the empty pool in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, when the prosaic atmosphere turns poetic, and spirits are seen to be “Moving without pressure… through the vibrant air… And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight… The surface glittered out of the heart of light.”
A painting on the easel – work in progress – shows two vast pollarded willows at Baston Fen, in a blaze of golden light, each leaf fringed with its own halo, bark fissured with dark. A charcoal drawing of the same trees is pinned to the wall opposite, their limbs sinuous as muscles. John Clare, the labouring-class poet who was schooled beneath Glinton Spire, a couple of miles from Lincoln’s studio, would have called this a “dotterel” tree, and compared it with an “ancient pulpit” , from which some black-coped rook might proclaim its own deep and ragged gospel. The trees stand in silent dialogue with the finished works that surround them on all sides, covering every inch of wall-space, and piled ten canvasses deep all around the room. There are abstracts evoking natural forms, flower details in fleshy richness, a green orchid from a bee’s-eye view, and woodland scenes suffused with ethereal light. A heron takes flight, transformed into a bird-shaped blaze of sun, and a crow stands sentinel on his own pulpit of poppies and gossamer, a sunlight glow issuing from his mouth, the heat of his body made visible to the naked eye.
It is the woodland scenes which are the first to draw my enchanted gaze. A recurring theme is a fascination with impenetrability and the temptation to trespass: a preoccupation summed up in the title of an early painting, No Way Through say the sun-bleached leafless bones before the green condensed morass. The Badger’s Trees (2008) is an invitation to trespass through the dark shades of an unwalked autumnal beechwood. The boles are like columns, and the more distant trees are dazzled into soft-focus by a brooding sun. It is like looking down the nave of a forbidden cathedral, standing perhaps in a puddle of light from the clerestory, and the eye is drawn irresistibly towards the great natural rose-window beyond the cool, dark interior of the choir. The composition is not unlike Graham Sutherland’s Entrance to a Lane: it is a painting that any walker will instinctively understand, for the invitation is extended equally by the shadows, and by the promise of what may lie beyond the rise. Entrance to Lawn Wood (2010) makes a similar invitation, with its gradation of warm to cool shades as the eye is drawn towards the centre of the canvas. Yet here, the inclination to trespass between the tree-trunks is tempered by an inkling that it would be the height of clodhopping human clumsiness to do so, for the withered and beautiful tendrils of clematis would have to be torn away in order to gain access. Once again, the painting would serve as a perfect illustration to a poem by John Clare: 'The Nightingale’s Nest', in which the poet invites an unseen companion to penetrate the wood:
Just where that old man’s beard all wildly trails
Rude arbours o’er the road and stops the way,
And where that child its bluebell flowers hath got
Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails.
There have I hunted like a very boy
Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorns
To find her nest and see her feed her young.
The temptation to enter is in tension with a reverence which bids us leave the tendrils as they are, lest in our heedlessness we trample something precious underfoot.
Two other paintings, Celtic Glow (2007) and Celtic Light (2007), preserve those moments which any walker knows, just after one has penetrated a wood, and the iris is still adjusting itself to the dappled light and shade. Paul Nash coined the phrase genius loci, or “spirit of place” in his own attempt to explain the effect on the imagination of these moments of splendour experienced in familiar rural places . Often, such experiences are tantalizingly fleeting. Celtic Light simulates the effect of a momentary bedazzlement which trembles on the border of mystical experience: the saplings wear colour fringes, and the instinct is to look away before the retina is seared. In Celtic Glow, we stand in a darker portion of the wood, looking out towards a sunlit glade. Creepers on a bole are like the exposed veins of a limb, and the whole scene seems to breathe with light: the glade becomes a point of intersection between this world and some other. Yet the eye is drawn to the right, beyond the glade and its “heart of light”, where the wood bends back away into darkness. Perhaps it is an invitation to press further on towards other glimpses of the sublime, or perhaps it is in order to experience something more chthonic – a woodland underworld. Eliot, after the fleeting mystical experience by the empty pool, is drawn from light to darkness: “Descend lower, descend only / Into the world of perpetual solitude…”
A softer light suffuses paintings such as Celtic Glade and Woodland Interior (2008): perhaps it is moonlight, for there are suggestions of stars gleaming through the depths of the wood. Here too, there are further visionary moments: a coppiced sapling sends out a wreath of backlit leaves, which become lozenges of light, fleeting suggestions of the magical. Mature trees loom, blurred and dark in a distant haze of green and gold which diffuses into the bluer tones of the sleeping woodland floor. It is significant that Lincoln chooses to describe such woodscapes as “Celtic”, for the moonlit glade is a still more fitting scene for some fleeting encounter with another world, whether the protagonist is about to encounter the red-eared hounds of Annwn, or like Clare, is on the trail of a nightjar’s “jarring noise” .
In some of Lincoln’s tree paintings, the vision of spirit seems to centre on the tree itself. Celtic Tree (2007) is another canvas with warm margins and a cool centre which draws the eye inward. It might represent a real tree with ivy leaves growing up a bole – but I am reminded of the strange visual effects a child may achieve when it rubs too hard at closed eyes, and the darkness unfurls into vivid, green, swirling ferns. Trees and ferns and ivy are innate to our perception, even with our eyes closed and our fists in our sockets. In Beneath the Ivied Tree (2008), the tree becomes a personification of the waning year. The sun’s faded warmth is retained in the colour of the fallen beech leaves, but in the woodland beyond, all heat has leached away, and the scene might be constructed of ice crystals. The ivy and the algal bloom about the roots are the last bastion of the green, which leaches outwards through the ivy’s tendrils, awaiting the warmth of spring, when the rising sap will spur the green to invade the wood once more. We see not only the tree’s bole and branches, but also its roots and we look into the earth to watch the leaves becoming humus in a natural underworld.
The Singing Tree (2008) echoes Clare’s invitation: “Up this green woodland ride let’s softly rove” . At the margin of a wood, a great tree breaks the winter sunlight into beams and droplets. The tree itself is leafless, striated with light, and erect as a monolith. To the left of the composition, the branches of the tree become indistinguishable from the dormant woodbines and clematis which reach out to unite it with the wood, reminding us of the tendency for unmanaged ground to revert to woodland – an onward march of the trees. Many such trees can be seen in the region where John Lincoln paints: gaunt outliers to the woods standing beside drainage ditches, overhanging a green swathe of grass on the edge of a field. They are a feature of a landscape which has been reclaimed from fenland, but isolated pockets of true fen have survived, and are another rich source of inspiration for the painter. A series of paintings from Thurlby and Baston Fen (2007-2010) explores this wilder landscape, and the distinction between the naturalistic and abstract is increasingly blurred. A Fallen Willow continues to grow after the trunk has splintered, and a Cut Willow becomes a sculptural, poised form like a horned animal. The flatness of the fenland landscape also enables trees to become “the one upright among all horizontals” , and at times, it becomes a stand-in for the sun itself (Sun Tree in the Fens, 2004).
Broken Willow (2010) is a tree viewed in a very different light, both literally and metaphorically. The cool tones of the surroundings contrast with the fleshiness of the wood, which is like a carcass, slaughtered and flayed, gnarled and raw as a Francis Bacon crucifixion. Yet again, there is the invitation to penetrate the darkness, this time through the hole in the bottom of the tree: a yawning chthonic orifice. Equally gnarled and leafless, but utterly different in tone, the thorn tree in While Dreaming in Blue Trees (2009) is impenetrable, orbed by the moon. Clutching, exposed roots implode into blue roses, the light orb of the moon shadowed by a lesser orb of darkness at the edge of a wood. The viewer instinctively listens for a hooting owl, and the tree, gaunt against its lunar halo, might be a Glastonbury thorn. The downward-pointing exposed roots are bleached as leg-bones, the feet stepping out into the flattened fenland field. Even a woodland has its nightmare visions: The Screaming Tree (2009) confronts us with the inevitable truth that birth, generation and growth are dependent upon death and decay. Yet in dying, the tree takes on new, organic forms, and becomes suggestive of life and motion. It becomes a woodland gargoyle with empty eye sockets, cryptogams bristling from its brows, and its own dead leaves spilling through the soil like one last, withered utterance. To the right, deep underground, a root clenches like a claw. The knotted wood of a Broken Tree (2009), with its icy lacework of white branches against a vivid purple background, becomes a crown of thorns, verdant beneath, blasted above. Graham Sutherland might have called this “a stand-in for a crucified head” , but here, the crown of thorns might be more of a safe-haven in the eyes of a bird seeking shelter.
A number of Lincoln’s paintings of impenetrable plants do, indeed, seem to be painted through the eyes of a bird. The most striking is Hedge Interior (2010), another painting which entices our fascination with looking beyond the light into the darker places. It might be the view of a bird about to penetrate to its nest, or of a hoverfly about to negotiate the ivy flowers. The hedge – an ancient one, as the variety of leaf-forms attests - fades endlessly into a golden distance, and our perspective alone can determine whether we interpret the hedge as barrier or as haven. A suitable inhabitant of the hedge might be the winter Wren: King of the Birds (2005). Clare’s “mossy rails” are there again, in the form of the fence above which the wren is perched, and the fence post itself is so festooned with ivy and brambles that it has become a tree in its own right. The composition is like a portrait – of a thorned Christ, perhaps, the wren perched upon his brow – but once again, there is a dark interior into which the wren may dart at any moment, particularly if it has the misfortune to be singled out for a folkloric hunting.
There are birds, but only rarely are there human figures in Lincoln’s paintings, and we are invited into a sympathy with the birds which never descends into anthropomorphism. Most striking of all are Lincoln’s crows. Deepings Crow Song (2005) – already mentioned above – depicts a young bird, the upper and lower bills still joined by flaps of skin. The natural history writer Roger Deakin, who praised the voices of rooks as “the roughest of folk song”, would surely have loved this painting, in which the bird itself becomes a nature spirit, warmth issuing from its mouth and seemingly filling the whole composition. Other Lincoln crows are built up in three dimensions out of pine needles and cone-scales (Fen Crow 1, 2007) or grass and papier-mâché (Fen Crow 2, 2007), and rooks stand sentinel, sunlit-red invaders outside a World War II pill-box in The Gathering of Crows (2006). Whether the exotic birds of the Self-immolation of Quetzalcoatl (2004) or the phoenix-like heron of Fen Spirit (2006), birds are either vessels of light, or looming clouds of corvid darkness (Fen Shadow, 2006). One bird, the whitened corvid of Vision in Hilly Wood (1992), is a stand-in for the spirit of John Clare himself, who, rejected by his earthly loves, has “snatched the sun’s eternal ray” through his artistic vision . It is spirituality informed by natural observation: crows really do sometimes appear to be white birds when the sun slants across their plumage.
The spirituality of Lincoln’s woodland and fenland scenes also finds meticulous expression in his pictures of much smaller things. Paintings such as Leaves and Grasses (2010) also speak of spirit manifest in nature, and here the “heart of light” is seen as if through a macro lens, or through the eye of a grasshopper. The canvas seems once more to invoke Clare:
Where moss did into cushions spring
Forming a seat of velvet hue,
A small unnoticed trifling thing
To all but heaven’s hailing dew.
A portion of Lincoln’s studio is dominated by paintings which, like Clare, see the sublime in smaller things. A series of sensual, magnified flowers depict them as the reproductive organs they really are: flower petals are like labial folds; a poppy pod is womb-like, and the petals inside it might be a folded foetus; and flowers viewed in cross section, in all their vibrant colour, are also reminiscent of the uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes (Dark Seed, 2002). Other paintings suggest both the microscopic and the astronomical in one image: The Sun in a Seed (2007) might be an image of cell division or of the swelling of some distant Red Giant, but in any case, it makes explicit the relationship between light and life – a relationship which is scientific fact as much as it is spiritual metaphor. In Seed Division (2007) and Seed Mutation (2008), the canvas erupts in three dimensions, and nuclei and mitochondria might equally be suns or moons. A part of the mechanism of the seed or cell erupts from the painting like a pulsing, exposed trachea. Other, unrelated paintings reveal similar preoccupations with light, growth and spirit: Woodland Wraith (2009) might be a hibernating dryad, an infolded will o’ th’ wisp waiting for the dark, or the half-metamorphosed body of a moth inside its chrysalis, deep in the bark. Stylistically, these paintings may seem to be polar opposites from Lincoln’s woodland scenes, but in fact, the central preoccupations are the same: the intensity of the observation, the literal and metaphorical association of light and life, the fascination with the imaginative persistence of the sense of spirit and symbol in a post-Darwinian world.
It is fitting that John Lincoln should have drawn so much of his inspiration from a landscape beloved of that other intense observer, Clare, who grew up two centuries ago in nearby Helpston. Clare lived to see his own familiar landscape torn to pieces by the Enclosure Acts: trees were cut down, streams diverted, and a rotational field system which had changed little since the Middle Ages was superimposed with a grid of hedges. Enclosure turned Clare into an inveterate trespasser, to whom a signpost saying “No Road Here” was too tantalising to be ignored. Clare specialised in “bird nesting”: penetrating the seemingly impenetrable coppices and spinneys so that he could observe the nesting habits of “pettichaps” and nightingales. Sun Strokes the Brambles in Hilly Wood (1995) is an early painting which captures Clare’s vision on one of these jaunts: a tangle of impenetrable bramble leaves imprison the spectrum of sunlight, like natural prisms. Clare Triptych (1993) shows, to left and right, two pre-Enclosure trees, an oak and a willow, and in the centre, one of the bridges Clare must often have traversed on foot, dominated by teasels in a wild and watery foreground. The visionary Blue Anemonie (2010) depicts a three-dimensional underworld of Clare’s imagining, inspired by the folkloric belief that the pasque flower grows wherever blood was once spilt on the battlefield. Like some of Lincoln’s trees, the pasque-flower is a stand-in for the sun, making explicit once more the connection between sun, blood and the growth of plants: an expression of the natural cycle which would have been instinctively understood by John Clare, the agricultural labourer. The buried soldier who gives rise to the flower might equally be Clare himself in his dreaming state, recalling a whole tradition of Romantic painting, from Samuel Palmer through to the modern Ruralist school , in which the poet is depicted in a nurturing and enwombing landscape .
Our contemporary fenland landscape, cowering under the iron fist of modern mechanised agriculture, is twice removed from Clare’s pre-Enclosure world, and the imaginative manifestations of spirit that Lincoln depicts are fleeting indeed for most of us in a post-industrial age. Many of Lincoln’s paintings are inspired by “wildlife sites”: conservation areas which have been rescued from the onslaught of intensive agriculture. Yet it is significant that these paintings probe the depths of our spirits: we still respond to these moments of illumination, and recognise them for what they are, no matter how secularised and urbanised our outlook. Lincoln invites us, as Clare did before him, between the mossy rails, into the impenetrable: the wood, the hedge, where there is no road. Tragically, in our modern age, some of us never find ourselves quite there, in bodily form, and we must fly there as birds, on the white wings of our imagination. Only there, it seems, can our spirits find haven, “Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves.”
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=P...
Links to our books on Goodreads:
A Burnished Echo
The Fen-Gazer
The Green Pulse
Avian Dreams
A Symphony of Leaves
Myriad Circles
A Secret Garden
Here is the essay I wrote as a preface to another book of John Lincoln's paintings, at the beginning of our association. It recounts a visit to his studio in the Lincolnshire Fens:
“Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves” :
nature and spirit in the art of John Lincoln
Giles Watson
To walk into John Lincoln’s studio is to pass, in a heightened state of awareness, by the borders of an ancient wood on the edge of undrained fen, as a low sun slants across the landscape and turns the leaves translucent. There is a warmth and a vibrancy of colour which heighten this sense of epiphany, and I am reminded irresistibly of the moment beside the empty pool in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, when the prosaic atmosphere turns poetic, and spirits are seen to be “Moving without pressure… through the vibrant air… And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight… The surface glittered out of the heart of light.”
A painting on the easel – work in progress – shows two vast pollarded willows at Baston Fen, in a blaze of golden light, each leaf fringed with its own halo, bark fissured with dark. A charcoal drawing of the same trees is pinned to the wall opposite, their limbs sinuous as muscles. John Clare, the labouring-class poet who was schooled beneath Glinton Spire, a couple of miles from Lincoln’s studio, would have called this a “dotterel” tree, and compared it with an “ancient pulpit” , from which some black-coped rook might proclaim its own deep and ragged gospel. The trees stand in silent dialogue with the finished works that surround them on all sides, covering every inch of wall-space, and piled ten canvasses deep all around the room. There are abstracts evoking natural forms, flower details in fleshy richness, a green orchid from a bee’s-eye view, and woodland scenes suffused with ethereal light. A heron takes flight, transformed into a bird-shaped blaze of sun, and a crow stands sentinel on his own pulpit of poppies and gossamer, a sunlight glow issuing from his mouth, the heat of his body made visible to the naked eye.
It is the woodland scenes which are the first to draw my enchanted gaze. A recurring theme is a fascination with impenetrability and the temptation to trespass: a preoccupation summed up in the title of an early painting, No Way Through say the sun-bleached leafless bones before the green condensed morass. The Badger’s Trees (2008) is an invitation to trespass through the dark shades of an unwalked autumnal beechwood. The boles are like columns, and the more distant trees are dazzled into soft-focus by a brooding sun. It is like looking down the nave of a forbidden cathedral, standing perhaps in a puddle of light from the clerestory, and the eye is drawn irresistibly towards the great natural rose-window beyond the cool, dark interior of the choir. The composition is not unlike Graham Sutherland’s Entrance to a Lane: it is a painting that any walker will instinctively understand, for the invitation is extended equally by the shadows, and by the promise of what may lie beyond the rise. Entrance to Lawn Wood (2010) makes a similar invitation, with its gradation of warm to cool shades as the eye is drawn towards the centre of the canvas. Yet here, the inclination to trespass between the tree-trunks is tempered by an inkling that it would be the height of clodhopping human clumsiness to do so, for the withered and beautiful tendrils of clematis would have to be torn away in order to gain access. Once again, the painting would serve as a perfect illustration to a poem by John Clare: 'The Nightingale’s Nest', in which the poet invites an unseen companion to penetrate the wood:
Just where that old man’s beard all wildly trails
Rude arbours o’er the road and stops the way,
And where that child its bluebell flowers hath got
Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails.
There have I hunted like a very boy
Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorns
To find her nest and see her feed her young.
The temptation to enter is in tension with a reverence which bids us leave the tendrils as they are, lest in our heedlessness we trample something precious underfoot.
Two other paintings, Celtic Glow (2007) and Celtic Light (2007), preserve those moments which any walker knows, just after one has penetrated a wood, and the iris is still adjusting itself to the dappled light and shade. Paul Nash coined the phrase genius loci, or “spirit of place” in his own attempt to explain the effect on the imagination of these moments of splendour experienced in familiar rural places . Often, such experiences are tantalizingly fleeting. Celtic Light simulates the effect of a momentary bedazzlement which trembles on the border of mystical experience: the saplings wear colour fringes, and the instinct is to look away before the retina is seared. In Celtic Glow, we stand in a darker portion of the wood, looking out towards a sunlit glade. Creepers on a bole are like the exposed veins of a limb, and the whole scene seems to breathe with light: the glade becomes a point of intersection between this world and some other. Yet the eye is drawn to the right, beyond the glade and its “heart of light”, where the wood bends back away into darkness. Perhaps it is an invitation to press further on towards other glimpses of the sublime, or perhaps it is in order to experience something more chthonic – a woodland underworld. Eliot, after the fleeting mystical experience by the empty pool, is drawn from light to darkness: “Descend lower, descend only / Into the world of perpetual solitude…”
A softer light suffuses paintings such as Celtic Glade and Woodland Interior (2008): perhaps it is moonlight, for there are suggestions of stars gleaming through the depths of the wood. Here too, there are further visionary moments: a coppiced sapling sends out a wreath of backlit leaves, which become lozenges of light, fleeting suggestions of the magical. Mature trees loom, blurred and dark in a distant haze of green and gold which diffuses into the bluer tones of the sleeping woodland floor. It is significant that Lincoln chooses to describe such woodscapes as “Celtic”, for the moonlit glade is a still more fitting scene for some fleeting encounter with another world, whether the protagonist is about to encounter the red-eared hounds of Annwn, or like Clare, is on the trail of a nightjar’s “jarring noise” .
In some of Lincoln’s tree paintings, the vision of spirit seems to centre on the tree itself. Celtic Tree (2007) is another canvas with warm margins and a cool centre which draws the eye inward. It might represent a real tree with ivy leaves growing up a bole – but I am reminded of the strange visual effects a child may achieve when it rubs too hard at closed eyes, and the darkness unfurls into vivid, green, swirling ferns. Trees and ferns and ivy are innate to our perception, even with our eyes closed and our fists in our sockets. In Beneath the Ivied Tree (2008), the tree becomes a personification of the waning year. The sun’s faded warmth is retained in the colour of the fallen beech leaves, but in the woodland beyond, all heat has leached away, and the scene might be constructed of ice crystals. The ivy and the algal bloom about the roots are the last bastion of the green, which leaches outwards through the ivy’s tendrils, awaiting the warmth of spring, when the rising sap will spur the green to invade the wood once more. We see not only the tree’s bole and branches, but also its roots and we look into the earth to watch the leaves becoming humus in a natural underworld.
The Singing Tree (2008) echoes Clare’s invitation: “Up this green woodland ride let’s softly rove” . At the margin of a wood, a great tree breaks the winter sunlight into beams and droplets. The tree itself is leafless, striated with light, and erect as a monolith. To the left of the composition, the branches of the tree become indistinguishable from the dormant woodbines and clematis which reach out to unite it with the wood, reminding us of the tendency for unmanaged ground to revert to woodland – an onward march of the trees. Many such trees can be seen in the region where John Lincoln paints: gaunt outliers to the woods standing beside drainage ditches, overhanging a green swathe of grass on the edge of a field. They are a feature of a landscape which has been reclaimed from fenland, but isolated pockets of true fen have survived, and are another rich source of inspiration for the painter. A series of paintings from Thurlby and Baston Fen (2007-2010) explores this wilder landscape, and the distinction between the naturalistic and abstract is increasingly blurred. A Fallen Willow continues to grow after the trunk has splintered, and a Cut Willow becomes a sculptural, poised form like a horned animal. The flatness of the fenland landscape also enables trees to become “the one upright among all horizontals” , and at times, it becomes a stand-in for the sun itself (Sun Tree in the Fens, 2004).
Broken Willow (2010) is a tree viewed in a very different light, both literally and metaphorically. The cool tones of the surroundings contrast with the fleshiness of the wood, which is like a carcass, slaughtered and flayed, gnarled and raw as a Francis Bacon crucifixion. Yet again, there is the invitation to penetrate the darkness, this time through the hole in the bottom of the tree: a yawning chthonic orifice. Equally gnarled and leafless, but utterly different in tone, the thorn tree in While Dreaming in Blue Trees (2009) is impenetrable, orbed by the moon. Clutching, exposed roots implode into blue roses, the light orb of the moon shadowed by a lesser orb of darkness at the edge of a wood. The viewer instinctively listens for a hooting owl, and the tree, gaunt against its lunar halo, might be a Glastonbury thorn. The downward-pointing exposed roots are bleached as leg-bones, the feet stepping out into the flattened fenland field. Even a woodland has its nightmare visions: The Screaming Tree (2009) confronts us with the inevitable truth that birth, generation and growth are dependent upon death and decay. Yet in dying, the tree takes on new, organic forms, and becomes suggestive of life and motion. It becomes a woodland gargoyle with empty eye sockets, cryptogams bristling from its brows, and its own dead leaves spilling through the soil like one last, withered utterance. To the right, deep underground, a root clenches like a claw. The knotted wood of a Broken Tree (2009), with its icy lacework of white branches against a vivid purple background, becomes a crown of thorns, verdant beneath, blasted above. Graham Sutherland might have called this “a stand-in for a crucified head” , but here, the crown of thorns might be more of a safe-haven in the eyes of a bird seeking shelter.
A number of Lincoln’s paintings of impenetrable plants do, indeed, seem to be painted through the eyes of a bird. The most striking is Hedge Interior (2010), another painting which entices our fascination with looking beyond the light into the darker places. It might be the view of a bird about to penetrate to its nest, or of a hoverfly about to negotiate the ivy flowers. The hedge – an ancient one, as the variety of leaf-forms attests - fades endlessly into a golden distance, and our perspective alone can determine whether we interpret the hedge as barrier or as haven. A suitable inhabitant of the hedge might be the winter Wren: King of the Birds (2005). Clare’s “mossy rails” are there again, in the form of the fence above which the wren is perched, and the fence post itself is so festooned with ivy and brambles that it has become a tree in its own right. The composition is like a portrait – of a thorned Christ, perhaps, the wren perched upon his brow – but once again, there is a dark interior into which the wren may dart at any moment, particularly if it has the misfortune to be singled out for a folkloric hunting.
There are birds, but only rarely are there human figures in Lincoln’s paintings, and we are invited into a sympathy with the birds which never descends into anthropomorphism. Most striking of all are Lincoln’s crows. Deepings Crow Song (2005) – already mentioned above – depicts a young bird, the upper and lower bills still joined by flaps of skin. The natural history writer Roger Deakin, who praised the voices of rooks as “the roughest of folk song”, would surely have loved this painting, in which the bird itself becomes a nature spirit, warmth issuing from its mouth and seemingly filling the whole composition. Other Lincoln crows are built up in three dimensions out of pine needles and cone-scales (Fen Crow 1, 2007) or grass and papier-mâché (Fen Crow 2, 2007), and rooks stand sentinel, sunlit-red invaders outside a World War II pill-box in The Gathering of Crows (2006). Whether the exotic birds of the Self-immolation of Quetzalcoatl (2004) or the phoenix-like heron of Fen Spirit (2006), birds are either vessels of light, or looming clouds of corvid darkness (Fen Shadow, 2006). One bird, the whitened corvid of Vision in Hilly Wood (1992), is a stand-in for the spirit of John Clare himself, who, rejected by his earthly loves, has “snatched the sun’s eternal ray” through his artistic vision . It is spirituality informed by natural observation: crows really do sometimes appear to be white birds when the sun slants across their plumage.
The spirituality of Lincoln’s woodland and fenland scenes also finds meticulous expression in his pictures of much smaller things. Paintings such as Leaves and Grasses (2010) also speak of spirit manifest in nature, and here the “heart of light” is seen as if through a macro lens, or through the eye of a grasshopper. The canvas seems once more to invoke Clare:
Where moss did into cushions spring
Forming a seat of velvet hue,
A small unnoticed trifling thing
To all but heaven’s hailing dew.
A portion of Lincoln’s studio is dominated by paintings which, like Clare, see the sublime in smaller things. A series of sensual, magnified flowers depict them as the reproductive organs they really are: flower petals are like labial folds; a poppy pod is womb-like, and the petals inside it might be a folded foetus; and flowers viewed in cross section, in all their vibrant colour, are also reminiscent of the uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes (Dark Seed, 2002). Other paintings suggest both the microscopic and the astronomical in one image: The Sun in a Seed (2007) might be an image of cell division or of the swelling of some distant Red Giant, but in any case, it makes explicit the relationship between light and life – a relationship which is scientific fact as much as it is spiritual metaphor. In Seed Division (2007) and Seed Mutation (2008), the canvas erupts in three dimensions, and nuclei and mitochondria might equally be suns or moons. A part of the mechanism of the seed or cell erupts from the painting like a pulsing, exposed trachea. Other, unrelated paintings reveal similar preoccupations with light, growth and spirit: Woodland Wraith (2009) might be a hibernating dryad, an infolded will o’ th’ wisp waiting for the dark, or the half-metamorphosed body of a moth inside its chrysalis, deep in the bark. Stylistically, these paintings may seem to be polar opposites from Lincoln’s woodland scenes, but in fact, the central preoccupations are the same: the intensity of the observation, the literal and metaphorical association of light and life, the fascination with the imaginative persistence of the sense of spirit and symbol in a post-Darwinian world.
It is fitting that John Lincoln should have drawn so much of his inspiration from a landscape beloved of that other intense observer, Clare, who grew up two centuries ago in nearby Helpston. Clare lived to see his own familiar landscape torn to pieces by the Enclosure Acts: trees were cut down, streams diverted, and a rotational field system which had changed little since the Middle Ages was superimposed with a grid of hedges. Enclosure turned Clare into an inveterate trespasser, to whom a signpost saying “No Road Here” was too tantalising to be ignored. Clare specialised in “bird nesting”: penetrating the seemingly impenetrable coppices and spinneys so that he could observe the nesting habits of “pettichaps” and nightingales. Sun Strokes the Brambles in Hilly Wood (1995) is an early painting which captures Clare’s vision on one of these jaunts: a tangle of impenetrable bramble leaves imprison the spectrum of sunlight, like natural prisms. Clare Triptych (1993) shows, to left and right, two pre-Enclosure trees, an oak and a willow, and in the centre, one of the bridges Clare must often have traversed on foot, dominated by teasels in a wild and watery foreground. The visionary Blue Anemonie (2010) depicts a three-dimensional underworld of Clare’s imagining, inspired by the folkloric belief that the pasque flower grows wherever blood was once spilt on the battlefield. Like some of Lincoln’s trees, the pasque-flower is a stand-in for the sun, making explicit once more the connection between sun, blood and the growth of plants: an expression of the natural cycle which would have been instinctively understood by John Clare, the agricultural labourer. The buried soldier who gives rise to the flower might equally be Clare himself in his dreaming state, recalling a whole tradition of Romantic painting, from Samuel Palmer through to the modern Ruralist school , in which the poet is depicted in a nurturing and enwombing landscape .
Our contemporary fenland landscape, cowering under the iron fist of modern mechanised agriculture, is twice removed from Clare’s pre-Enclosure world, and the imaginative manifestations of spirit that Lincoln depicts are fleeting indeed for most of us in a post-industrial age. Many of Lincoln’s paintings are inspired by “wildlife sites”: conservation areas which have been rescued from the onslaught of intensive agriculture. Yet it is significant that these paintings probe the depths of our spirits: we still respond to these moments of illumination, and recognise them for what they are, no matter how secularised and urbanised our outlook. Lincoln invites us, as Clare did before him, between the mossy rails, into the impenetrable: the wood, the hedge, where there is no road. Tragically, in our modern age, some of us never find ourselves quite there, in bodily form, and we must fly there as birds, on the white wings of our imagination. Only there, it seems, can our spirits find haven, “Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves.”
August 7, 2020
Turnshoes: Remnants of Anglo-Saxon Life in the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage and West Stow Village, Suffolk.
Readings of a selection of these poems, with photographs of the objects that inspired them, can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
Owing to problems with copyright on my photos of West Stow Anglo-Saxon village, these poems were never published. This is the whole collection:
Turnshoes:
Remnants of Anglo-Saxon Life
in the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage and West Stow village, Suffolk.
Giles Watson
All poems © Giles Watson, 2012
Prologue: The Hanney Brooch
The earth is a deep red womb.
They lie her back in it, arms limp
at her sides. Perhaps there is a wound,
or a blench of disease, a bluing lip,
and beautiful eyes already sinking
in her skull, which will cave in
with the weight of loam. A spindle
is wrapped in lifeless fingers.
There are glazed pots, jars of glass
and a useful knife. Fertile soil
clogs her ears, enters her sagging
mouth. Ground waters leach and spoil
Her braided hair. And when she is reborn
into air, the brooch that held her cloak
glints with garnets. The old brown
Dust clogs the cloisons in their concentric
rings of gold. A boss of cuttlefish bone
gleams white amongst the mould,
the foil and filigree broken
by the plough. All that heart and mind
waiting among the worms and mud
to be shovelled up: she was twenty-five.
Will she spin again? Will some smith mend
the gildings, some god make her alive?
The Hanney brooch was found in 2009 amongst the remains of a female aged around twenty-five years in a field near West Hanney, Oxfordshire. Its owner lived in the seventh century, and was possibly a high-ranking member of the local Saxon Gewisse tribe. Whilst the pattern on her brooch is cruciform, and conforms to the height of Christian Anglo-Saxon fashion, her mourners also followed the more pagan custom of inhuming a range of other, more useful burial goods alongside her body. It visited the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage, for a short period in 2012.
The Cremation
After the fire was raked, and the embers were only warm,
she knelt to pick out the porous chalk of his fingers, dust
on her palms. Scraps of charred cloth, melted brooches:
all went into the urn, along with the smoke-dry bones
of his skull, and all remnants of his appetites and lusts.
She bit off a sob, wiped away smuts, breathed a charm,
bade something from beyond to make him whole.
a peace came over her: a sacred trust. Her breaths
grew calmer. She dropped trinkets in the ashes,
like keepsakes for a shepherd-doll – tiny metal shears,
gleaming in the wind-stirred powder of his bones –
embraced the urn beneath her cloak of wool.
Inspired by the collection of pagan (6th Century) Anglo Saxon cremation urns, one of which contained a miniature pair of shears.
Saxon Man
Please do not touch the Saxon man:
he is worn enough already,
his eyeballs getting out of hand,
his face no longer ruddy.
His nose is ground into a snout.
Beneath his jutting chin,
cloth of limestone binds his throat;
shell-fossils crust his skin.
He rebuilt Dorchester and Chichester,
threw up earth and timber ramparts
at Wareham, Wallingford and Cricklade,
repelled the Vikings, worked in iron,
copper, gold, amber – mastered
filigree and interlace – assembled
garnets in the eyes of dragons,
forged brick-heavy buckles, buried
men in ships, helmeted himself,
glowering beneath his visor, turned
scholar, worked in enamels, made
aestels magnified with crystal,
wrapped them with intricate gildings,
engraving even the hidden parts
with leafwork, left the inscription:
AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN.
Shell-fossils crust his skin.
Cloth of limestone binds his throat
beneath his jutting chin.
His nose is ground into a snout,
his face no longer ruddy,
his eyeballs getting out of hand.
He’s worn and you’re not ready:
you cannot touch the Saxon man.
Inspired by a 7th to 8th Century Anglo-Saxon stone carving from Eynsham, now on display in the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage, and that most exquisite of English treasures, the aestel known as the Alfred Jewel, in the Ashmolean Museum.
His Knife
My cord was cut with this, when this and I were young.
With this I wore my whetstone; beside this I grew strong.
This impaled an apple; I skinned a boar with this.
This shaved me when I was a man, wanting my first kiss.
This carved the hunk of bread, spread the butter thickly.
This killed the goat I’d grown to love; this did it quickly.
This fed me hand to mouth – was rarely in its sheath:
I whittled, gouged and stabbed with this; this picked my teeth.
When they come to bury me, with this I shall find bliss –
and when they come to dig me up, they’ll find my bones
and this.
Inspired by two knife blades (Abingdon, 5th-7th Century) and a whetstone (Oxford, 10th Century). For Anglo-Saxon people, there was no more essential possession than a knife. The same tool might be used for eating (forks were not used), shaving, carving and killing animals for food, and at the end of life, one could expect to also be buried with one’s knife. The handles of the knives would have been made of wood or bone.
Buckles
A buckle for a king is no buckle at all:
an ornamental token sewn on where
a buckle might have been. It recalls
a dragon with interlacing scales, eyes
that never tarnish. It takes a whole
boat to bury its owner, but the tongue
of his buckle is silent, welded in place.
Lesser buckles have ways of speaking:
buckles that puckered tucked garments;
buckles on shoes; functional buckles
at the ends of belts, half way down
leather straps for slinging satchels;
buckles for attaching scabbards, closing
purses, joining mismatched bits
of leather; burnished buckles; buckles
with a green patina; pock-marked buckles
six feet under; buckles that stopped
swords, held babies in place; chafing
buckles one notch too tight; buckles
at the throats of dogs; dainty buckles;
buckles strong enough to hold
a heavy horse and never buckle.
Give me a buckle fit for function:
of bronze or iron – not of gold –
give me a good black strap of leather,
punched for snugness, and a buckle
to hold my heart together: to stay
intact, though I turn cold.
Inspired by a comparison of the entirely ornamental great gold buckle of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial with a small collection of utilitarian buckles from Watchfield and Didcot (5th to 7th Centuries) in the Vale and Downland Museum.
Shield-Boss
A stump of metal to protect a clenched fist,
a shield-boss is a weapon in itself, aimed
with a well-timed punch at a man’s temple:
it can have the brains out before there’s time
to raise his sword; the round wooden orb
can flatten his head, halo him in death
with its bronze-studded nimbus. It can take
a blade hard on its point, deflect it back
into a man’s guts, then crush him as he
clutches his own intestines, barely grazing
its wielder’s knuckles. It wouldn’t take much
to make an industry out of iron: this already
reads like a string of slogans. Amid the rout,
your fist’ll be safe while you’re slugging it out.
Inspired by an Anglo-Saxon shield-boss.
Spearheads
The spears became: not pruning hooks,
but leaves, pocked with galls and mines,
caterpillar-chewed by that old champer,
rust. First it gnawed the edges, taking
bites out of iron, staining it soil-coloured.
Now even the midribs are cratered,
as though Puccinia has invaded, intent
on rotting old growth back to soil.
Those hollow petioles once were grafted
into shafts: well-whittled poles, hefty
enough to drive a wedge of iron straight
through a shield, and half-way into
a man’s guts. He crunches to his knees,
nurses his impaler in a close embrace,
coughs up blood and a litany of names:
“Poplar, willow, holly, birch, ash, elm:
you and I give leaf, and end in loam.”
Inspired by three fifth-to-seventh century spear-heads from Watchfield cemetery. Puccinia is the generic name of the pathogenic fungi which cause plant rusts.
Wusa’s Balance
What would Wusa want with his balance
in the next world, with all that weighing
in progress, on a so-much larger scale?
And on our own illusory terra-firma,
waiting for that changing-into-dust,
what did he weigh then, against
a stack of coins already defunct,
stamped with heads of dead men,
their teeth unearthed by moles?
Was Wusa weighing gold, dividing
the spoil, when others went to Mass?
Was it then or later that the plague came?
There is no other gold in Wusa’s grave:
only this. And what would Wusa want
with his balance in the next world?
A grave excavated at Watchfield contained the remains of a young man, who died aged 20-25 at some time between A.D. 520 and 570. The balance, the scales of which may have been hammered out of old brooches, was buried with him inside a leather case, along with a selection of coins which would have had no monetary value by the time he was alive, and which must have been used as weights. The metal fitting of the leather case also survives, and has a runic inscription which has been tentatively translated: “These are army account books. Wusa kept them.” Perhaps Wusa was an army official, but it has also been suggested that he was a travelling salesman.
A Watchfield Girl
I stare into the orbs that housed your eyes –
am sucked into the slots for optic nerves,
and try to inhabit the mind of a sixth-century
girl aged twenty-five: how you treasured
that coin strung about your throat – a gift
from your husband – and your brooches,
paired, polished, at the height of fashion,
(twice as far apart as those sockets), adorning
your cloak of herb-dyed wool, fastened
at the neckline with an iron pin – and how
you carried little implements for plucking
hairs and trimming nails. But it is the knife
all gone to rust, with its soiled memories
of paring roots, scaling fish, cutting yarn –
and that rash of algal green upon your right
cheek and jaw – that let me reach you:
one who lived, loved, died in a fall, writhing
on the ground with fractured spine. I see
those eyes cast down, thinking private things:
distracted, diverted by some kinder man
who had no coin. One last and silly lapse
in concentration.
This skeleton of an Anglo-Saxon woman, buried in Watchfield in 525-575 AD, has fractured bones in the right arm, leg and spine, consistent with a fall. She was a woman of some standing, as suggested by her brooches – and she stood tall for her time, at 5 feet, 5 ½ inches.
Her Brooches
Mineralised on the backs of her brooches,
the fabric of her cloak and the corroded
pins are a crust, clinging to the copper:
all sunk into her ribcage as the bones
collapsed. The front-sides are gilded –
bright barriers to decay, glints to catch
the eye of her excavator – engraved
with a wheel, a cross, rippling water.
Bend closer to see the pursed lip as she
struggles with the pin, utters a little curse,
and her warm breath steams the gilding.
These are 5th to 7th Century brooches from Watchfield cemetery – similar to those worn by that “Watchfield Girl”.
The Ducklington Beads
The skeletons are arranged like scribbles,
skulls facing eastwards, disarticulated
echoes of the foetus-curve: a boy, aged
fifteen, front teeth absent; a young woman,
five feet high; a child of three, in fragmentary
state, sex indeterminate. They have been
buried with buckets and spindles, a beaver’s
tooth clenched in gold, fragments of bronze.
she wears a necklace. We strip it from her –
mount it in parts in different museums.
Beautiful beads: how these were treasured!
count them: eleven. Five like flesh, streaked
with fat, cured on a smoky fire. Two are white
with spots of ochre. One is sky, and clouds –
another bright as saffron from a rare flower’s
anther. This drab one is green – as withered
leaves in winter, covered with mould. The last
is all eye and lid and spiral, with a watching
yellow pupil. Watch us out of the dank ground;
ward off the prying eye. Our words are scribbles.
Inspired by beads from the 7th Century Romano-British Ducklington burial.
Amber Beads
If there are flies imprisoned in the resin,
we cannot see them, the amber clouded
over after long inhumation: prehistoric
beads, smoothed by the sea’s primeval
motion. She beachcombed them herself
with a hopeful treasure-seeker’s stoop,
grooming the sand for these frozen,
polished droplets – transfixed each one,
lived a lifetime with them ripening
at her throat – was seeded, ploughed in
with them, and the string that held them
rotted in unison with her spinal cord,
the beads escaping between her ribs
to the space once occupied by lungs,
gradually oxidising. We cannot see them
imprisoned in resin, if there are flies.
Inspired by a sixth century necklace of amber beads, found on the remains of a woman in the Anglo Saxon cemetery at Watchfield.
Comb
Now the comb is jagged-toothed
as stalagmites, and the rivets
leach haloes of rust into the bone.
She held it, whorled and white
and beautiful, and stripped
her glorious hair of lice, shook
it like a mane, transfixed
a flea between her fingernails,
and flirted. Earth piled in
on it, compacted over centuries.
fleas and lice died in soil.
time knocked out the teeth.
Inspired by an Anglo Saxon comb (6th Century, from Wallingford), fashioned out of bone.
Chatelaine
It is a happy marriage between beauty and utility.
All the vain and useful things hang from a string
between her brooches, where her hair can tangle
with them: a fetching little detail, just below
the hollow of her throat. Tweezers, easily detached
for plucking eyebrows, a roll of metal which holds
a brush for blackening lashes, a useful pin,
beads of animal bone, fingered absentmindedly –
and guarding that secret of her heart, a latched
padlock, the key long corroded in mould.
Inspired by 5th-7th Century chatelaine items from Didcot and Watchfield, Oxfordshire.
Spindle-Whorl and Loom-Weights
Wood smoke permeates the room,
seeps into rough-hewn timbers,
leaves its taint on hair and fingers,
the hearth at the centre open
to the sky. Teasel heads, frayed
from carding, kindle on the fire
in sudden flares as the lanolin
ignites, and by its light, she tucks
distaff under arm, sits down,
strings wool to the spindle, runs
its straw-thin shaft from knee
to thigh, plays out as the spinning
gains momentum, and when
the yarn is at arm’s length, pauses,
winds the slack beneath the whorl,
then recommences, her lip pursed
with concentration. Hanging by her:
madder, woad, weld and alkanet –
her dying herbs – will make rusts,
blues, yellows, lilacs. Her husband
saves his urine for the mordant.
Against one wall, a rug, half-finished,
hangs from a warp-weighted loom,
held straight by rings of clay: its weft
and warp all twills and herringbones.
in the darkest corner, a baby mewls.
All the wood, leather, wool and herb
turns back to soil, leaving only
loom-weights, a spindle-whorl
and a thigh-length shaft of bone.
Inspired by the collection of spindle-whorls and loom-weights. Textiles were produced as a matter of course in Anglo-Saxon homes, and every house had its own loom, but the only remains of this ubiquitous industry are the clay loom-weights, the stone spindle-whorls, and occasional fragments of mineralised textile on the reverse sides of brooches. Anglo-Saxon clothing would have been quite colourful, the dyes derived from a variety of herbs, lichens and possibly also insects. Mordanting was the process of fixing the dye. This could be achieved by soaking in an iron cauldron, salting, or by using the oxalic acid from wood-sorrel. A still more easy and effective method was to soak the dyed wool in stale urine before weaving.
Cauldron
The copper disintegrates like a fallen leaf
devoured by a mildew of verdigris.
It flakes at the edges, embracing
a clod of soil where a hearty stew
once boiled, and a column of steam
and smoke ascended through the roof
towards the stars. The metal chain
that kedged it to a beam is rusted
into oblivion, the hollow ladle gone
through the guts of worms, after
the wood decayed. Lean in to hear
an echo of ancient conversations,
trapped in the bowels of the cauldron,
the tongues and teeth that formed
the words long-cold, surrendered
to the hungry sovereignty of soil.
Inspired by the remains of a 6th Century copper-alloy cauldron from Watchfield Cemetery. The cauldron would have been suspended over a hearth, either from a roof-beam or from a tripod. Smoke and steam would have escaped the house through a hole in the ceiling.
Dice
The molar of a sheep or cow is layered
like folded pastry, cross-sectioned
by a hacksaw, worn smooth with a rasp.
It only takes a gimlet to gouge holes –
and a horn of ale to whet the taste
for making wagers – and the whole
refectory comes to life. Or perhaps
the game, proscribed, was played
surreptitiously in a shadowed corner
of a scriptorium, the cries of triumph
or of anguish stifled under cowls –
unaccountable delays in illuminating
the latest Rule of Saint Benedict –
the winnings tallied on spare strips
of vellum, with gambling-booty
smuggled out in a pig’s bladder.
The whole tribe of ungulates, utilised
to the last strip of skin and sinew
while sleek monks count their winnings.
Inspired by Anglo-Saxon dice made of animal teeth and bone, from Eynsham Abbey (10th Century) and Didcot (6th- 7th Centuries).
Incisor
Precious as amber: a curved tooth
for cleaving timber, notched
as a worn chisel. This sliver
of calcium peeled the bark,
sliced the grain, channered
as the tree fell, lopped off branches,
helped to clasp the limbless
wooden torso in a chomping
grip; bore the strain as the whole
thing was dragged across
the ground, into the river,
tugged against currents, wedged
the trunk between banks, slung
down other boles for reinforcement –
and ended up clasped in gold,
hung from string around a child’s
exposed and breathing throat.
Blood pulsed through the jugular
just beneath it. Air whistled
through the trachea. Peristalsis
was a surge all down the gullet,
until the child stopped swallowing,
and the breathing rasped its last,
and the corpuscles clumped in clots
all about the valve. Some things
never change: all the amulets
strung for luck will not avert
the irreversible felling.
A beaver’s tooth amulet in a gold setting was one of the grave goods associated with the remains of a small child at the 7th Century Romano-British Ducklington burial.
The Bucket
There is no kicking it: it takes some craftsmanship
to make it watertight – to tongue-and-groove
those strips of yew, screw them all together
with copper bands, and the iron handle is worth
more than some men’s lives – so we only bury it
with those who could afford it. Most people
make do with an unglazed pot, a hollowed scoop
of oak, a cupped pair of hands – or drink straight
from the stream; they are resourceful enough
to find water in the next world by themselves.
Dig it in deep with Aethelwold: he’ll need it.
He never lifted cup to lip without assistance,
still less fetched it and lugged it a mile, slopping
at the brim. Who knows? It may be a different
matter, on the other side, now his heart has given
out.
Buckets are rare in the archaeological record, suggesting that they were luxury items, and they are only ever found in well-equipped graves. It seems likely that they were status symbols. Only the metal parts survive in this specimen, along with enough traces of the mineralised wood for us to be confident that the bucket was made of wood from a yew tree.
Turnshoe
To walk with God, take shoes which look
seamless as the robe of Christ
and cross the parched and endless lake.
Leave no footprints in the dust,
and if the stitches chafe your heel,
you must not flag or turn about:
take off your britches and your cloak,
pause to don them inside-out.
Walk away, both torn and whole,
from where your bones lie under clods.
all the souls who die and wake
get blisters when they walk with God.
Turnshoes, like this 9th Century example, were turned inside-out after they were made, in order to preserve the stitches from wear. Shoes of this design may well have been worn by King Alfred the Great. Anglo-Saxon Christian burials perpetuated the pagan custom of interment with grave goods.
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Owing to problems with copyright on my photos of West Stow Anglo-Saxon village, these poems were never published. This is the whole collection:
Turnshoes:
Remnants of Anglo-Saxon Life
in the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage and West Stow village, Suffolk.
Giles Watson
All poems © Giles Watson, 2012
Prologue: The Hanney Brooch
The earth is a deep red womb.
They lie her back in it, arms limp
at her sides. Perhaps there is a wound,
or a blench of disease, a bluing lip,
and beautiful eyes already sinking
in her skull, which will cave in
with the weight of loam. A spindle
is wrapped in lifeless fingers.
There are glazed pots, jars of glass
and a useful knife. Fertile soil
clogs her ears, enters her sagging
mouth. Ground waters leach and spoil
Her braided hair. And when she is reborn
into air, the brooch that held her cloak
glints with garnets. The old brown
Dust clogs the cloisons in their concentric
rings of gold. A boss of cuttlefish bone
gleams white amongst the mould,
the foil and filigree broken
by the plough. All that heart and mind
waiting among the worms and mud
to be shovelled up: she was twenty-five.
Will she spin again? Will some smith mend
the gildings, some god make her alive?
The Hanney brooch was found in 2009 amongst the remains of a female aged around twenty-five years in a field near West Hanney, Oxfordshire. Its owner lived in the seventh century, and was possibly a high-ranking member of the local Saxon Gewisse tribe. Whilst the pattern on her brooch is cruciform, and conforms to the height of Christian Anglo-Saxon fashion, her mourners also followed the more pagan custom of inhuming a range of other, more useful burial goods alongside her body. It visited the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage, for a short period in 2012.
The Cremation
After the fire was raked, and the embers were only warm,
she knelt to pick out the porous chalk of his fingers, dust
on her palms. Scraps of charred cloth, melted brooches:
all went into the urn, along with the smoke-dry bones
of his skull, and all remnants of his appetites and lusts.
She bit off a sob, wiped away smuts, breathed a charm,
bade something from beyond to make him whole.
a peace came over her: a sacred trust. Her breaths
grew calmer. She dropped trinkets in the ashes,
like keepsakes for a shepherd-doll – tiny metal shears,
gleaming in the wind-stirred powder of his bones –
embraced the urn beneath her cloak of wool.
Inspired by the collection of pagan (6th Century) Anglo Saxon cremation urns, one of which contained a miniature pair of shears.
Saxon Man
Please do not touch the Saxon man:
he is worn enough already,
his eyeballs getting out of hand,
his face no longer ruddy.
His nose is ground into a snout.
Beneath his jutting chin,
cloth of limestone binds his throat;
shell-fossils crust his skin.
He rebuilt Dorchester and Chichester,
threw up earth and timber ramparts
at Wareham, Wallingford and Cricklade,
repelled the Vikings, worked in iron,
copper, gold, amber – mastered
filigree and interlace – assembled
garnets in the eyes of dragons,
forged brick-heavy buckles, buried
men in ships, helmeted himself,
glowering beneath his visor, turned
scholar, worked in enamels, made
aestels magnified with crystal,
wrapped them with intricate gildings,
engraving even the hidden parts
with leafwork, left the inscription:
AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN.
Shell-fossils crust his skin.
Cloth of limestone binds his throat
beneath his jutting chin.
His nose is ground into a snout,
his face no longer ruddy,
his eyeballs getting out of hand.
He’s worn and you’re not ready:
you cannot touch the Saxon man.
Inspired by a 7th to 8th Century Anglo-Saxon stone carving from Eynsham, now on display in the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage, and that most exquisite of English treasures, the aestel known as the Alfred Jewel, in the Ashmolean Museum.
His Knife
My cord was cut with this, when this and I were young.
With this I wore my whetstone; beside this I grew strong.
This impaled an apple; I skinned a boar with this.
This shaved me when I was a man, wanting my first kiss.
This carved the hunk of bread, spread the butter thickly.
This killed the goat I’d grown to love; this did it quickly.
This fed me hand to mouth – was rarely in its sheath:
I whittled, gouged and stabbed with this; this picked my teeth.
When they come to bury me, with this I shall find bliss –
and when they come to dig me up, they’ll find my bones
and this.
Inspired by two knife blades (Abingdon, 5th-7th Century) and a whetstone (Oxford, 10th Century). For Anglo-Saxon people, there was no more essential possession than a knife. The same tool might be used for eating (forks were not used), shaving, carving and killing animals for food, and at the end of life, one could expect to also be buried with one’s knife. The handles of the knives would have been made of wood or bone.
Buckles
A buckle for a king is no buckle at all:
an ornamental token sewn on where
a buckle might have been. It recalls
a dragon with interlacing scales, eyes
that never tarnish. It takes a whole
boat to bury its owner, but the tongue
of his buckle is silent, welded in place.
Lesser buckles have ways of speaking:
buckles that puckered tucked garments;
buckles on shoes; functional buckles
at the ends of belts, half way down
leather straps for slinging satchels;
buckles for attaching scabbards, closing
purses, joining mismatched bits
of leather; burnished buckles; buckles
with a green patina; pock-marked buckles
six feet under; buckles that stopped
swords, held babies in place; chafing
buckles one notch too tight; buckles
at the throats of dogs; dainty buckles;
buckles strong enough to hold
a heavy horse and never buckle.
Give me a buckle fit for function:
of bronze or iron – not of gold –
give me a good black strap of leather,
punched for snugness, and a buckle
to hold my heart together: to stay
intact, though I turn cold.
Inspired by a comparison of the entirely ornamental great gold buckle of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial with a small collection of utilitarian buckles from Watchfield and Didcot (5th to 7th Centuries) in the Vale and Downland Museum.
Shield-Boss
A stump of metal to protect a clenched fist,
a shield-boss is a weapon in itself, aimed
with a well-timed punch at a man’s temple:
it can have the brains out before there’s time
to raise his sword; the round wooden orb
can flatten his head, halo him in death
with its bronze-studded nimbus. It can take
a blade hard on its point, deflect it back
into a man’s guts, then crush him as he
clutches his own intestines, barely grazing
its wielder’s knuckles. It wouldn’t take much
to make an industry out of iron: this already
reads like a string of slogans. Amid the rout,
your fist’ll be safe while you’re slugging it out.
Inspired by an Anglo-Saxon shield-boss.
Spearheads
The spears became: not pruning hooks,
but leaves, pocked with galls and mines,
caterpillar-chewed by that old champer,
rust. First it gnawed the edges, taking
bites out of iron, staining it soil-coloured.
Now even the midribs are cratered,
as though Puccinia has invaded, intent
on rotting old growth back to soil.
Those hollow petioles once were grafted
into shafts: well-whittled poles, hefty
enough to drive a wedge of iron straight
through a shield, and half-way into
a man’s guts. He crunches to his knees,
nurses his impaler in a close embrace,
coughs up blood and a litany of names:
“Poplar, willow, holly, birch, ash, elm:
you and I give leaf, and end in loam.”
Inspired by three fifth-to-seventh century spear-heads from Watchfield cemetery. Puccinia is the generic name of the pathogenic fungi which cause plant rusts.
Wusa’s Balance
What would Wusa want with his balance
in the next world, with all that weighing
in progress, on a so-much larger scale?
And on our own illusory terra-firma,
waiting for that changing-into-dust,
what did he weigh then, against
a stack of coins already defunct,
stamped with heads of dead men,
their teeth unearthed by moles?
Was Wusa weighing gold, dividing
the spoil, when others went to Mass?
Was it then or later that the plague came?
There is no other gold in Wusa’s grave:
only this. And what would Wusa want
with his balance in the next world?
A grave excavated at Watchfield contained the remains of a young man, who died aged 20-25 at some time between A.D. 520 and 570. The balance, the scales of which may have been hammered out of old brooches, was buried with him inside a leather case, along with a selection of coins which would have had no monetary value by the time he was alive, and which must have been used as weights. The metal fitting of the leather case also survives, and has a runic inscription which has been tentatively translated: “These are army account books. Wusa kept them.” Perhaps Wusa was an army official, but it has also been suggested that he was a travelling salesman.
A Watchfield Girl
I stare into the orbs that housed your eyes –
am sucked into the slots for optic nerves,
and try to inhabit the mind of a sixth-century
girl aged twenty-five: how you treasured
that coin strung about your throat – a gift
from your husband – and your brooches,
paired, polished, at the height of fashion,
(twice as far apart as those sockets), adorning
your cloak of herb-dyed wool, fastened
at the neckline with an iron pin – and how
you carried little implements for plucking
hairs and trimming nails. But it is the knife
all gone to rust, with its soiled memories
of paring roots, scaling fish, cutting yarn –
and that rash of algal green upon your right
cheek and jaw – that let me reach you:
one who lived, loved, died in a fall, writhing
on the ground with fractured spine. I see
those eyes cast down, thinking private things:
distracted, diverted by some kinder man
who had no coin. One last and silly lapse
in concentration.
This skeleton of an Anglo-Saxon woman, buried in Watchfield in 525-575 AD, has fractured bones in the right arm, leg and spine, consistent with a fall. She was a woman of some standing, as suggested by her brooches – and she stood tall for her time, at 5 feet, 5 ½ inches.
Her Brooches
Mineralised on the backs of her brooches,
the fabric of her cloak and the corroded
pins are a crust, clinging to the copper:
all sunk into her ribcage as the bones
collapsed. The front-sides are gilded –
bright barriers to decay, glints to catch
the eye of her excavator – engraved
with a wheel, a cross, rippling water.
Bend closer to see the pursed lip as she
struggles with the pin, utters a little curse,
and her warm breath steams the gilding.
These are 5th to 7th Century brooches from Watchfield cemetery – similar to those worn by that “Watchfield Girl”.
The Ducklington Beads
The skeletons are arranged like scribbles,
skulls facing eastwards, disarticulated
echoes of the foetus-curve: a boy, aged
fifteen, front teeth absent; a young woman,
five feet high; a child of three, in fragmentary
state, sex indeterminate. They have been
buried with buckets and spindles, a beaver’s
tooth clenched in gold, fragments of bronze.
she wears a necklace. We strip it from her –
mount it in parts in different museums.
Beautiful beads: how these were treasured!
count them: eleven. Five like flesh, streaked
with fat, cured on a smoky fire. Two are white
with spots of ochre. One is sky, and clouds –
another bright as saffron from a rare flower’s
anther. This drab one is green – as withered
leaves in winter, covered with mould. The last
is all eye and lid and spiral, with a watching
yellow pupil. Watch us out of the dank ground;
ward off the prying eye. Our words are scribbles.
Inspired by beads from the 7th Century Romano-British Ducklington burial.
Amber Beads
If there are flies imprisoned in the resin,
we cannot see them, the amber clouded
over after long inhumation: prehistoric
beads, smoothed by the sea’s primeval
motion. She beachcombed them herself
with a hopeful treasure-seeker’s stoop,
grooming the sand for these frozen,
polished droplets – transfixed each one,
lived a lifetime with them ripening
at her throat – was seeded, ploughed in
with them, and the string that held them
rotted in unison with her spinal cord,
the beads escaping between her ribs
to the space once occupied by lungs,
gradually oxidising. We cannot see them
imprisoned in resin, if there are flies.
Inspired by a sixth century necklace of amber beads, found on the remains of a woman in the Anglo Saxon cemetery at Watchfield.
Comb
Now the comb is jagged-toothed
as stalagmites, and the rivets
leach haloes of rust into the bone.
She held it, whorled and white
and beautiful, and stripped
her glorious hair of lice, shook
it like a mane, transfixed
a flea between her fingernails,
and flirted. Earth piled in
on it, compacted over centuries.
fleas and lice died in soil.
time knocked out the teeth.
Inspired by an Anglo Saxon comb (6th Century, from Wallingford), fashioned out of bone.
Chatelaine
It is a happy marriage between beauty and utility.
All the vain and useful things hang from a string
between her brooches, where her hair can tangle
with them: a fetching little detail, just below
the hollow of her throat. Tweezers, easily detached
for plucking eyebrows, a roll of metal which holds
a brush for blackening lashes, a useful pin,
beads of animal bone, fingered absentmindedly –
and guarding that secret of her heart, a latched
padlock, the key long corroded in mould.
Inspired by 5th-7th Century chatelaine items from Didcot and Watchfield, Oxfordshire.
Spindle-Whorl and Loom-Weights
Wood smoke permeates the room,
seeps into rough-hewn timbers,
leaves its taint on hair and fingers,
the hearth at the centre open
to the sky. Teasel heads, frayed
from carding, kindle on the fire
in sudden flares as the lanolin
ignites, and by its light, she tucks
distaff under arm, sits down,
strings wool to the spindle, runs
its straw-thin shaft from knee
to thigh, plays out as the spinning
gains momentum, and when
the yarn is at arm’s length, pauses,
winds the slack beneath the whorl,
then recommences, her lip pursed
with concentration. Hanging by her:
madder, woad, weld and alkanet –
her dying herbs – will make rusts,
blues, yellows, lilacs. Her husband
saves his urine for the mordant.
Against one wall, a rug, half-finished,
hangs from a warp-weighted loom,
held straight by rings of clay: its weft
and warp all twills and herringbones.
in the darkest corner, a baby mewls.
All the wood, leather, wool and herb
turns back to soil, leaving only
loom-weights, a spindle-whorl
and a thigh-length shaft of bone.
Inspired by the collection of spindle-whorls and loom-weights. Textiles were produced as a matter of course in Anglo-Saxon homes, and every house had its own loom, but the only remains of this ubiquitous industry are the clay loom-weights, the stone spindle-whorls, and occasional fragments of mineralised textile on the reverse sides of brooches. Anglo-Saxon clothing would have been quite colourful, the dyes derived from a variety of herbs, lichens and possibly also insects. Mordanting was the process of fixing the dye. This could be achieved by soaking in an iron cauldron, salting, or by using the oxalic acid from wood-sorrel. A still more easy and effective method was to soak the dyed wool in stale urine before weaving.
Cauldron
The copper disintegrates like a fallen leaf
devoured by a mildew of verdigris.
It flakes at the edges, embracing
a clod of soil where a hearty stew
once boiled, and a column of steam
and smoke ascended through the roof
towards the stars. The metal chain
that kedged it to a beam is rusted
into oblivion, the hollow ladle gone
through the guts of worms, after
the wood decayed. Lean in to hear
an echo of ancient conversations,
trapped in the bowels of the cauldron,
the tongues and teeth that formed
the words long-cold, surrendered
to the hungry sovereignty of soil.
Inspired by the remains of a 6th Century copper-alloy cauldron from Watchfield Cemetery. The cauldron would have been suspended over a hearth, either from a roof-beam or from a tripod. Smoke and steam would have escaped the house through a hole in the ceiling.
Dice
The molar of a sheep or cow is layered
like folded pastry, cross-sectioned
by a hacksaw, worn smooth with a rasp.
It only takes a gimlet to gouge holes –
and a horn of ale to whet the taste
for making wagers – and the whole
refectory comes to life. Or perhaps
the game, proscribed, was played
surreptitiously in a shadowed corner
of a scriptorium, the cries of triumph
or of anguish stifled under cowls –
unaccountable delays in illuminating
the latest Rule of Saint Benedict –
the winnings tallied on spare strips
of vellum, with gambling-booty
smuggled out in a pig’s bladder.
The whole tribe of ungulates, utilised
to the last strip of skin and sinew
while sleek monks count their winnings.
Inspired by Anglo-Saxon dice made of animal teeth and bone, from Eynsham Abbey (10th Century) and Didcot (6th- 7th Centuries).
Incisor
Precious as amber: a curved tooth
for cleaving timber, notched
as a worn chisel. This sliver
of calcium peeled the bark,
sliced the grain, channered
as the tree fell, lopped off branches,
helped to clasp the limbless
wooden torso in a chomping
grip; bore the strain as the whole
thing was dragged across
the ground, into the river,
tugged against currents, wedged
the trunk between banks, slung
down other boles for reinforcement –
and ended up clasped in gold,
hung from string around a child’s
exposed and breathing throat.
Blood pulsed through the jugular
just beneath it. Air whistled
through the trachea. Peristalsis
was a surge all down the gullet,
until the child stopped swallowing,
and the breathing rasped its last,
and the corpuscles clumped in clots
all about the valve. Some things
never change: all the amulets
strung for luck will not avert
the irreversible felling.
A beaver’s tooth amulet in a gold setting was one of the grave goods associated with the remains of a small child at the 7th Century Romano-British Ducklington burial.
The Bucket
There is no kicking it: it takes some craftsmanship
to make it watertight – to tongue-and-groove
those strips of yew, screw them all together
with copper bands, and the iron handle is worth
more than some men’s lives – so we only bury it
with those who could afford it. Most people
make do with an unglazed pot, a hollowed scoop
of oak, a cupped pair of hands – or drink straight
from the stream; they are resourceful enough
to find water in the next world by themselves.
Dig it in deep with Aethelwold: he’ll need it.
He never lifted cup to lip without assistance,
still less fetched it and lugged it a mile, slopping
at the brim. Who knows? It may be a different
matter, on the other side, now his heart has given
out.
Buckets are rare in the archaeological record, suggesting that they were luxury items, and they are only ever found in well-equipped graves. It seems likely that they were status symbols. Only the metal parts survive in this specimen, along with enough traces of the mineralised wood for us to be confident that the bucket was made of wood from a yew tree.
Turnshoe
To walk with God, take shoes which look
seamless as the robe of Christ
and cross the parched and endless lake.
Leave no footprints in the dust,
and if the stitches chafe your heel,
you must not flag or turn about:
take off your britches and your cloak,
pause to don them inside-out.
Walk away, both torn and whole,
from where your bones lie under clods.
all the souls who die and wake
get blisters when they walk with God.
Turnshoes, like this 9th Century example, were turned inside-out after they were made, in order to preserve the stitches from wear. Shoes of this design may well have been worn by King Alfred the Great. Anglo-Saxon Christian burials perpetuated the pagan custom of interment with grave goods.
Mass Extinction Poems
One of the things I am currently working on is a series of poems and pastels reflecting on the dire state of Australian biodiversity, and the threats to some of our most iconic species. I have recorded readings of some of them, which you can hear as you view the pastel, by following the YouTube links under each poem:
Bogong Moths and Pygmy Possums
(Poem by Giles Watson.)
We had the sunroom built when I was small,
overlooking the Brindabellas. I could make out
Mount Franklin, the long plateau of Gingera,
the huddled stone hulk of Mount Coree, and when
the sun went down and the lights came on,
bogong moths, fat as bullets, slapped themselves
against our windows, leaving smears
of dark brown wingscales - hundreds of them.
In the morning, they’d hang, torpid arrowheads,
closewinged under the eaves, their sooty robes
marked with darker sigils, long abdomens
plump with protein. I know now, but didn’t know
then, they were on their way to Queensland,
navigating by magnetic field: millions
upon millions of noctuids, ricocheting
off tree trunks, fibreglass sheds, window panes.
They slept in a cave on Gingera
‘til the stone was so thick with moths
they scaled it like shingles, wings
overlapping. Last year, scientists
went to look for them: there were only three.
And that’s why inside the pouches
of pygmy possums, the little ones
starve and shrivel at the teats, entombed
inside their mothers: because
drought killed all the moths,
carbon caused the drought, and humans
burnt the carbon, and sprayed
insecticide all along the flight-path.
When I was a kid, folks used to say
bogong moths were just about edible
if you were desperate: they were fatty,
so the first time you ate them, you threw up
from too much nutrition. Tribesfolk
rolled them into balls, stuck them
on twigs and toasted them. You couldn’t
make half a rissole of them now.
And when I shut my eyes to hear
rainfall against the window, still I think
of bogongs, though the sky is always empty,
and my nightmares are long lines of silent
starving honey possums staggering into dark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVyuR...
Regent Honeyeater
(Poem by Giles Watson. Picture based on a photograph by Gerard Jenkins from Canberra Birds and Wildlife. Birdsong recording by Marius Travell.)
The bird book I grew up with describes them
in flocks of hundreds, descending
on the Eucalypts in flower,
their voices bubbling like mountain-water
forming rivulets over quartz.
Older books called them warty-faced,
as though not noticing their plumes of ivory,
ebony and gold. They might have been called
the Spiderweb Bird, since they stitch
intricate nests of tree-bark together
with their silk, or Blossom Bird,
Lerp Bird, Bird of Charcoal and Sunlight,
but instead they called them Regents:
temporarily enthroned. By latest estimates
there are scarcely enough left to crown
a single flock, their forests felled,
their valleys flooded, their last singing-places
awash with babbling flames.
It's all hydroelectric and reservoirs,
glib governmental compromises,
concrete, chainsaws and crassness,
the songlines severed like limp serpents,
and every ephemeral beauty trampled.
Close, close the childhood book: we're through.
Its joys no longer joys, its truths no longer true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGQxD...
Corroboree Frogs
(Poem by Giles Watson, 13th January 2020)
I was twelve, and enraptured, deep in the Brindabellas,
jeans soaked to the knees in bogwaters.
Bulbous katydids trundled over moss,
their gumnut-brown elytra hiding fat abdomens
multicoloured as gobstoppers. Fallen eucalypts,
grey as sable, melted into squelching soil.
And there they were, where my father’s colleague
said they would be: slow-moving corroboree frogs
like impossibly precious living stones, obsidian veined
with sulphur, breathing jewels precipitated out of
wetness, scintillating in their highly polished skins.
Today the news came: their last remaining bastions
cannot yet be reached - the fires are still burning -
so we cannot know whether nature spared them
once again, or whether the bogland is boiled alive,
and I lie in bed suppressing tears, fearing
that while I slept, these little living encapsulations
of everything that’s sublime went out of the world
forever. And the child, aged twelve, for all his delight,
could not gauge the gravity of that moment:
that the tiny being who blessed his hand by crawling
across it could, in his lifetime, be for always gone.
Note: Although there are populations of healthy captive Corroboree Frogs kept in zoos, their numbers in the wild are dwindling beyond the point of no return as climate change dries up their habitats, chytrid fungus invades, and most recently, bushfires destroy their homes. The status of the Corroboree Frog as a wild species is threatened primarily by their having nowhere suitable to live. They are specialised animals, adapted for crawling (they do not jump) around in upland Sphagnum bogs. The recent bushfire catastrophe in eastern Australia destroyed some, but not all of their last remaining sites. The multicoloured insects mentioned in the poem are actually the Mountain Katydid, Acripeza reticulata. The poem narrates my own experience at a location in the Brindabella mountains south of Canberra, some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgNo-...
Superb Lyrebird
(Poem by Giles Watson. Picture based on a photograph by Gerard Jenkins. Birdsong recording by Marc Anderson.)
Everything is diminishing, like a lyrebird
shimmering off into undergrowth, until
it is nothing but the dappledness of dry ferns
and fallen leaves, a quivering string
of Eucalyptus bark. The wet sclerophyll
turned fire-prone years ago; its tinder
crackles underfoot. Wood that once
was mossy lies sunbleached. The undergrowth
has died, and the next hillside is treeless.
The lyrebirds have nothing left to imitate
save chainsaws channering at the future,
depriving our country of moisture. This is when
it all goes up in flame: withered fronds,
shredded bark, leaves like parchment,
the lyrebird’s plumes, dancing into heaven,
common birds turned threatened
in a blinking. And all the armchair experts
have a theory: it was arson, it was fuel loads,
it was the Greens, or Mother Nature
being cruel – anything, anything but admitting
it was us who did this – that we are the knowing,
remorseless killers of lyrebirds, feral
as felines, stropping our claws with bank-statements,
stalking feathered innocence, causing loss, killing
with a fraction of the mercy of the fox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbj_M...
Bogong Moths and Pygmy Possums
(Poem by Giles Watson.)
We had the sunroom built when I was small,
overlooking the Brindabellas. I could make out
Mount Franklin, the long plateau of Gingera,
the huddled stone hulk of Mount Coree, and when
the sun went down and the lights came on,
bogong moths, fat as bullets, slapped themselves
against our windows, leaving smears
of dark brown wingscales - hundreds of them.
In the morning, they’d hang, torpid arrowheads,
closewinged under the eaves, their sooty robes
marked with darker sigils, long abdomens
plump with protein. I know now, but didn’t know
then, they were on their way to Queensland,
navigating by magnetic field: millions
upon millions of noctuids, ricocheting
off tree trunks, fibreglass sheds, window panes.
They slept in a cave on Gingera
‘til the stone was so thick with moths
they scaled it like shingles, wings
overlapping. Last year, scientists
went to look for them: there were only three.
And that’s why inside the pouches
of pygmy possums, the little ones
starve and shrivel at the teats, entombed
inside their mothers: because
drought killed all the moths,
carbon caused the drought, and humans
burnt the carbon, and sprayed
insecticide all along the flight-path.
When I was a kid, folks used to say
bogong moths were just about edible
if you were desperate: they were fatty,
so the first time you ate them, you threw up
from too much nutrition. Tribesfolk
rolled them into balls, stuck them
on twigs and toasted them. You couldn’t
make half a rissole of them now.
And when I shut my eyes to hear
rainfall against the window, still I think
of bogongs, though the sky is always empty,
and my nightmares are long lines of silent
starving honey possums staggering into dark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVyuR...
Regent Honeyeater
(Poem by Giles Watson. Picture based on a photograph by Gerard Jenkins from Canberra Birds and Wildlife. Birdsong recording by Marius Travell.)
The bird book I grew up with describes them
in flocks of hundreds, descending
on the Eucalypts in flower,
their voices bubbling like mountain-water
forming rivulets over quartz.
Older books called them warty-faced,
as though not noticing their plumes of ivory,
ebony and gold. They might have been called
the Spiderweb Bird, since they stitch
intricate nests of tree-bark together
with their silk, or Blossom Bird,
Lerp Bird, Bird of Charcoal and Sunlight,
but instead they called them Regents:
temporarily enthroned. By latest estimates
there are scarcely enough left to crown
a single flock, their forests felled,
their valleys flooded, their last singing-places
awash with babbling flames.
It's all hydroelectric and reservoirs,
glib governmental compromises,
concrete, chainsaws and crassness,
the songlines severed like limp serpents,
and every ephemeral beauty trampled.
Close, close the childhood book: we're through.
Its joys no longer joys, its truths no longer true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGQxD...
Corroboree Frogs
(Poem by Giles Watson, 13th January 2020)
I was twelve, and enraptured, deep in the Brindabellas,
jeans soaked to the knees in bogwaters.
Bulbous katydids trundled over moss,
their gumnut-brown elytra hiding fat abdomens
multicoloured as gobstoppers. Fallen eucalypts,
grey as sable, melted into squelching soil.
And there they were, where my father’s colleague
said they would be: slow-moving corroboree frogs
like impossibly precious living stones, obsidian veined
with sulphur, breathing jewels precipitated out of
wetness, scintillating in their highly polished skins.
Today the news came: their last remaining bastions
cannot yet be reached - the fires are still burning -
so we cannot know whether nature spared them
once again, or whether the bogland is boiled alive,
and I lie in bed suppressing tears, fearing
that while I slept, these little living encapsulations
of everything that’s sublime went out of the world
forever. And the child, aged twelve, for all his delight,
could not gauge the gravity of that moment:
that the tiny being who blessed his hand by crawling
across it could, in his lifetime, be for always gone.
Note: Although there are populations of healthy captive Corroboree Frogs kept in zoos, their numbers in the wild are dwindling beyond the point of no return as climate change dries up their habitats, chytrid fungus invades, and most recently, bushfires destroy their homes. The status of the Corroboree Frog as a wild species is threatened primarily by their having nowhere suitable to live. They are specialised animals, adapted for crawling (they do not jump) around in upland Sphagnum bogs. The recent bushfire catastrophe in eastern Australia destroyed some, but not all of their last remaining sites. The multicoloured insects mentioned in the poem are actually the Mountain Katydid, Acripeza reticulata. The poem narrates my own experience at a location in the Brindabella mountains south of Canberra, some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgNo-...
Superb Lyrebird
(Poem by Giles Watson. Picture based on a photograph by Gerard Jenkins. Birdsong recording by Marc Anderson.)
Everything is diminishing, like a lyrebird
shimmering off into undergrowth, until
it is nothing but the dappledness of dry ferns
and fallen leaves, a quivering string
of Eucalyptus bark. The wet sclerophyll
turned fire-prone years ago; its tinder
crackles underfoot. Wood that once
was mossy lies sunbleached. The undergrowth
has died, and the next hillside is treeless.
The lyrebirds have nothing left to imitate
save chainsaws channering at the future,
depriving our country of moisture. This is when
it all goes up in flame: withered fronds,
shredded bark, leaves like parchment,
the lyrebird’s plumes, dancing into heaven,
common birds turned threatened
in a blinking. And all the armchair experts
have a theory: it was arson, it was fuel loads,
it was the Greens, or Mother Nature
being cruel – anything, anything but admitting
it was us who did this – that we are the knowing,
remorseless killers of lyrebirds, feral
as felines, stropping our claws with bank-statements,
stalking feathered innocence, causing loss, killing
with a fraction of the mercy of the fox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbj_M...
August 5, 2020
Some reflections on glass
The following marvellous article about the windows in Emily Dickinson's house has reminded me of my own fascination with the reflective, refractive and distorting qualities of glass:
https://sites.udel.edu/mcses2012/pape...
My own interest in the aesthetics of the imperfections in glass began when I lived in England, and took this big collection of photographs of windows in churches and other public buildings:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/2932096...
... Which also culminated in this poem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxEoP...
Of course, the other thing about windows is that they are framing devices; you can compose different pictures depending where you stand relative to a favourite window. A few minutes' thought about windows in literature will show how powerful a window is for an author as an observational device.
But I love most of all the insight in Xiao Situ's article that nineteenth century (and earlier glass) always contained something of the breath of the glassblower, just as a poem always contains something of a poet.
https://sites.udel.edu/mcses2012/pape...
My own interest in the aesthetics of the imperfections in glass began when I lived in England, and took this big collection of photographs of windows in churches and other public buildings:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/2932096...
... Which also culminated in this poem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxEoP...
Of course, the other thing about windows is that they are framing devices; you can compose different pictures depending where you stand relative to a favourite window. A few minutes' thought about windows in literature will show how powerful a window is for an author as an observational device.
But I love most of all the insight in Xiao Situ's article that nineteenth century (and earlier glass) always contained something of the breath of the glassblower, just as a poem always contains something of a poet.
August 2, 2020
A Mist Can Make a Mountain Float: Poems in Honour of Emily Dickinson
When you teach a poet's works often enough, something rubs off on your own writing. These are some examples which show Emily Dickinson working her way out through my own writing.
Readings of some of these poems are here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
He climbs inside - Volcanoes -
When we - evacuate -
He tests - and takes - the Temperature -
To catch it - in a Chart -
His Payment - astronomical -
The Danger - most Extreme -
He plots the welling - Pressure -
The superficial - Calm -
An open Heart - revealing
A deeper - laval - Glow -
A Prophecy - foretelling
Pyroclastic - Flow -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2021. For Angus Miller.
The Peacock she embroidered
Is still - alive -
The Frame his Hands have fashioned
Is all his Love -
The Peacock - tilts to touch them -
The Blush - of Blooms -
Skies - in Eyes of Feathers -
His Tail - festoons -
Beyond the Frame - Hydrangeas
Be held - in Glass -
Confuse - what is Eternal
And what must pass -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2021.
And then the Rose burst into Leaf
Beneath each savage Cut -
Leaves the red of Rust - or Blood -
Their Growth borne out - of Hurt -
So we slice through Life and Height
To thicken out the Stulp -
Wielding ruthless Secateurs -
Remorseless in our Grip.
The more we hack - the more she grows
More strong where she is hurt -
A Blade to force the Bud - to split -
And rout the Fungus - out -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I pruned the Rose today - at last -
And only left one Bud -
A Blight was spattering the Leaves
With darkened Drops - of blood -
Now she stands - disfigured sticks -
One Twig - remains unscathed -
It bears the lonely signs of Life -
Haphazard Mercy - saved -
So all the other Flowers wilt -
Their ragged Petals stripped -
Each Calyx withers into Brown
The scarlet Hip is - stopped.
Sentiment’s a fickle thing -
I choose which Flowers must die
And later leap to slay - a Flea -
Or save - a Butterfly -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Chrysalis - dissolves the Grub -
Into a flux - of Life -
Spines and eyes and segments steep
In Ferment - stripped of Self -
Yet wings and thorax - head and tongue
Emboss the promised Form
Upon the Crust of Chrysalis -
Its Destiny - a Charm -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Window where I like to work
Looks out upon the Rose
Whose Briars rise beyond
And bloom above my height.
A Bedhead - made of brass - we placed
Once - for a plot of Peas
But now it leans amongst the Herbs
And like a Plant - it grows
In my affections. Sometimes - a Rail
Flicks dust-motes from her tail
Amongst these Leaves - then scatters
Trailing chicks the hue of charcoal -
Or a quenda noses among roots
Snouting neat and conical holes.
Up by the fence - a red Hibiscus -
Below - a Bobtail licks her scales
And ferns block out the sunlight
Or Peppermints leave it laced
With shadows. A Lavender
Makes knops of Purple -
Lemon Balm - a calming Simple -
And Marigolds - marrying gold
To green - jostle with Lemongrass -
As Mountain Thyme creeps between.
A flash of Wrens seems to blend
With Agapanthus - Poppies’ shreds
Wilt in summer - Blackflies gather
On the Mint and Balm - and rise
Like tornadoes at the Watering.
When Dusk is on its way
I look again - there glows
Our Orchid-coloured lampshade
Reflected in the Rose.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Hovering - on the Edges -
The Kestrel - in my head -
Melts into a Brightness-
Becomes a vivid - Wood -
Detailed - to the leaf-veins -
Quivering - with Growth -
Hallowed - out of Harvest -
Echoing - with Truth -
Vibrant - to the Axils -
Shimmering - beyond -
Melting - and condensing
Into - a Bracken Frond -
The Leaf becomes a Feather -
The Twig - becomes a Bone -
And Frond returns - to Kestrel -
She flies me - deeper - Home -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Butterfly’s Soliloquy
Is Breath and Wind - and Lift -
A Wish - dispelling Gravity -
To send - a Soul - aloft -
I hear it - like a Feather
Floating - from a Bird -
It utters - without speaking -
And means - without a word -
It hushes with an Updraft -
It brushes - through the Light -
It spirals - into Sunshine -
Exhales - and is lost -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A Blur of Cobalt - Bead - of Eye -
Behind a screen of leaves
Is all that we shall see today
Of how he - fleeting - lives -
Between interstices - of Twigs -
A sidestep - into flight -
A hawk or raven’s claw - from Death -
And every moment - fraught -
Who yesterday was swelled - with Pluck -
And brazen on the Lawn
Snapped up Midges - at a flit -
Then scattered down the Lane.
Perhaps some Shadow hovered
And darkened - as he flew -
So now he is at pains - to hide
Extravagance - of Blue -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Silence is not loved enough -
We break it - at a whim -
Not content with Wilderness -
The wideness - of the Wind -
The muffled flight - of Nightjars -
The whisper of the Dusk -
The quivering of whiskers -
The glaze - upon a Lake.
If you - once - heard their engines
Revved merciless - to tear
The stillness from the Twilight
As fingernails - rend hair -
And heard the Tranquil murdered
As talons crush - a mouse -
You’d hold your upstairs Window
As sacrosanct - your House
Would be your only Haven
From chainsaws - raceways - roads -
We took the Tulle of Nature
And roared it - into shreds -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Pale exhaustion made me lie
With clouds - across my gaze -
Sunlight made them dissipate
Like threads teased out - of gauze -
Vanishing into a Sky
So vast - it drowned my mind -
And every thought I ever had
Was scorched - in solar Wind -
And in that Blue - at last beheld
With Eye - the end of I -
I watched a World - evaporate -
In depths that swallowed - me -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Cicada easing from the Shell
Unsheathing all her Limbs –
Her Crust of Chitin – jettisoned –
Becomes the frame she climbs –
A sexless Exoskeleton –
Exquisite empty Cast –
And she a Denizen of Night –
A Life the Dew has kissed –
Who breathes through open Spiracles –
Who stares through Eyes of Froth –
Who soon will stridulate her Praise
Of Earth – that thrust her forth –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I found a shell so riddled
It seemed to be - of Lace -
More Air than solid Substance -
Less Permanence - than Loss -
The Bobbins that had made it
Were Shipworms - and the Sand -
I stopped to find its Filigree
Had crushed - inside my hand -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Black Swans under Thunderclouds
Score wakes upon the Silver -
Bodies ink - faces nibs -
Etching out - the Weather -
Each bill tipped - with Cochineal -
To tilt - toward the Storm -
Embodiments of Shadowings -
Dark Promisers - of Dawn -
I wish that you could watch our Swans
Swim Night into our Day -
As if it were not Life - to live -
Nor even Death - to die -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Then - is the End of Knowing -
Cold - is the Unknown - When -
Done - with the Work of shining -
Constellations - None -
Dark - as a Globe - upturning
Over a Ground - undone -
Moon - and the Snow - obscuring -
White - melting into - Gone -
Black - is the Flame unguessing -
Never - the Light - again -
Hope - is the Face - averting -
Turning the Eyes from - Then -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I saw the Children crouching low -
Their cheeks between their knees -
Intently staring at the sand -
And - ruffled by the breeze -
A little Puddle full of brine.
I stopped to see the cause -
Spindling amid the silt
A Prawn - with heavy Claws -
Each of them an algal green
And shunted up ahead -
A pale - aloof - transparent Thing.
Seized with mortal Dread
It spurted - sudden as a flinch -
And shot into a Hole
As though it feared to be plucked
From Home - and swallowed whole.
I shot Home too - within the Hour -
Propelled - in my own right -
Tender-shelled and burden-clawed
Launched into - Respite.
Life can be a curious Child -
How prawnlike I can be
When its shadow looms too close
And bends - to poke - at me -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
An antique Compass on a chain
Encompasses my throat -
The Needle - ever quivering -
Circumscribes - a Nought -
I hold it up before my Eye -
The Iris spanned - across -
Whirling to disorient -
The Pupil darts - off Course -
Cards conspire to confuse -
Coordinates - compel -
Now there is no further North
Encircling - a Pole -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I hid behind the Curtains –
He flushed me – into Sight –
I scampered down the Hallway –
Invoked the Dark – of Night –
He blundered – into Tables –
I hid – behind a Chair –
He paused to light – a Lantern –
I was – no longer – There –
I hunched myself – beneath a Bed –
I felt the Mattress pitch –
I knew he sat above me now –
And kept a Spider’s watch –
I heard his Pulse – I smelt his Rage –
His Incandescence – burned –
Then he stood – astride my World –
My Darkness – overturned –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A soft Cicada - fresh emerged
Is rose-pink and tender -
Freshly conjured out of Liquid
Buried all the Winter -
Resting on a Superstructure
Crisp as fallen leaf -
Fragile to a poking finger -
Husk - of fleeting Life -
Beyond conjecture - her Achievement -
A Toil nobody sees -
Pale - unmoving - one more Moment -
Dreaming Roots - of Trees -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
We’ve been interred - a Century -
Sisters - Father - Mother -
Five Skeletons of common Bone -
Under Flagstones - gathered -
What remains - above the Ground -
Names - engraved in Marble -
Compacted underneath your feet -
Earth - to keep Us humble -
So - we’d slumber ‘til the Judgement
Placid under Stone -
And leave you to your lives - provided
You leave Us alone -
But we scream and rend our Coffins
‘Til our fingernails are split -
Now We are alone - our Father
Grubbed out of soil and grit -
Flee - and leave the Church door open -
Run aghast - in living dread -
Out into the bleeding Silence -
Jolly Robin - lying dead -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I never met a Hummingbird
Whose iridescence flashed
Before my eyes - like nectar’s ghost -
In sugar-questing flight -
But quiver-plumaged flickerings
Bright ephemeral forms -
Electricities - of Wrens -
Cobalt hearts - of flames.
You and I - though “introverts” -
As long as we draw breath
Live for mundane miracles
Familiar - to both -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A Mist can make a Mountain float –
Reflected upside-down –
As egrets stir the mirror-glazed
Surface of the Dawn –
Obliterate a cityscape
Behind a veil of light –
And leave the Heart sequestered
In ecstasies – of Sight –
Where every line is simplified
And every ripple – smoothed –
And solitary – Soul – exult –
In rising Vapours – breathed!
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
By imperceptible degree
We die - if not by shock -
No remedy - it will not do
To spike the nerveless Clock -
Or ram a needle through the spokes
Or try to break the teeth
Of cogs cut out of Adamant
Or hold the Piece beneath
Some torrent - for it will not drown
Nor yet submit - to wrath -
But hardly noticed - drive the Hand
That ticks us out - to Death -
A pendulum - impervious -
Sways dauntless - ever on -
Until machine mortality’s
The only thing not - gone -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
When we were deep in trespassing
We came upon a mound
The termites heaved up out of soil –
A hive of art – and mind –
Orchids stippled at its base
Stems thrust into ochre –
Tubers swelled beside the Queen
In her forbidden acre.
Hidden our meandering ways
As roots that twist in earth
Until a flagrant flowering
In unbidden – growth –
Sung its sunlight into space
Through every dappled hollow
And marked the ground where none may go
Jubilant – in yellow –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I feel a Leather compassing
About my bleeding Mind
And Someone drew the Buckle - in -
I cannot clutch - to mend -
I sense it hanging - like a Shroud
From the flexing Strap -
Blinded by a Tightening
That never deigns - to Stop -
Tyrant of my screeching Soul
Who blots - with stunning Light -
My holy Dark - in negative -
Searing into - White -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I throw my Inspiration – out –
It falls – to a Black Hole –
The Word can only whirl about
Extinguishment – of Soul –
The circuit of my World – is flung
Into hungry Dark –
With all the Beauty – all the Art –
Every human Work –
Yet in the very Vortex – look –
It flies – on fragile Wings –
The Fragment indestructible
Enduring all our Wrongs –
Airborne Tissue – veined for strength –
Alive – and ever sought –
Elusive – tangible – untamed –
Through the blast – of Nought –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Where the gold-green Mirror Tree
Is leaning into Sun
A Beetle of Enamel sleeps
As Whistlers smelt their Song.
The Rose spots her Elytra –
Dimpled at the edges
With lines of perfect pinpricks
Small as Eyes – of Midges –
Yet with your withering poisons
I see you stoop – to spray –
I wonder how – such Gildings! –
You bear to look – away –
What eye could close undaunted
And who could turn aloof?
I swear – I fairly staggered –
Bedazzled so – with Leaf –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I saw a Type of Butterfly
Not seen since – as a Boy –
I glimpsed one at a Nettle-bed
And chased it on its Way –
And glimpsing as it flitted
In and out of Light
How the Sun reflected
Off flashing Wings – I sought –
The Velvet of its Burgundy
The Sulphur in its Splash
Melting into Shadow-glades –
A Child’s fleeting Wish –
And here it is – enduring
On Blossoms of the Lime –
That bright Glimpse of the Imago
Untainted yet – by Time –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020. The butterfly is Vanessa itea.
I learned a line – of cruelty –
Too offhand to recite –
Because it will not scan – with Love –
I stutter – to relate –
How it tore the heart from Truth
And fed it – to the flies –
Made a mockery of Hope –
Proclaimed as Gospel – lies –
It sought to staunch the singing Bird
With a throttling hand
And throw it to the howling crowd
Who scorned – to understand.
When coffins of Humanity
With unctuous flags – are draped –
I marvel that the verse survived
Or that the Bird – escaped –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
When Cockatoos come to our trees
To probe grubs under bark
And all the Grove creaks with the calls
Of wild things on the Brink –
With voices of split Hakea pods
And Banksias’ pursed beaks
And Grass-Tree foliage in the rasps –
The Grove resounds – with Cracks –
Of splintered bark in plier-sharp bills –
It’s then I wonder – why –
Humans stoop to scorn each other –
Interrupt – and lie –
Or worse that – incarcerate –
The Ravaged One – who flees –
If hate grows from too little time
Spent staring – into trees –
If Cockatoos glimpsed – through the leaves –
Could probe our hatreds – yet –
Like grubs that tunnel under bark –
Ere Evil wipes – us – out –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I like a Bee – for Industry
More than other workers
For something in her Business
Has time to pause – for Wonders –
And there’s a Serendipity
About her waggling way –
Refracted by – Kaleidoscopes –
In her compound eye.
One flower – she sees – a hundred times –
It lets the Nectar run –
She steals a certain Leisure to
Distil it – with the Sun –
Inspiration’s accident –
Fermented – out of Light –
Is Honey that can rarely – be –
Brewed well – by flying – straight –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
High up the beach – there is mudstone –
Solid and pitted with holes –
I half-think stone crabs must have built them
Of silt – and of powder – of shells –
But Science still masters me – sometimes –
With questions – like – How will it end –
Will petrification work faster
Than water wears stone into sand –
Or will high tide and sediment ever
Make as they mar – equally –
Mudflats in stasis with mudstone
‘Til mountains are cast into sea?
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
An Apple - sheds a ribboned peel -
The skin retains a curl
The shape of all Encompassing -
Fresh now - soon to spoil -
Pale of flesh and bright of skin -
Juice-wet and exposed -
Coiled upon a cutting-block -
Not yet - oxidised -
Wait - and hold the breath - a spell -
Let this be - Enough -
A paring to perfection - spilled
From the whetted Knife -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The heron brings both her feet forward
In the very last moments of flight -
And now that I’m coming here always
She closes her wings unafraid.
I think how I once nursed a fledgling
And wonder - perhaps this is she -
Who eyes me alert and unnerving
And holds the fish under her sway -
And if I once held her to feed her -
I hold her now - poised to land -
And she holds the right to ignore me
An inch before touching - the ground -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
How easy – to be overlooked –
As Nightingales – are drab –
Despite your incandescent voice
Obscurity – can’t curb –
And though you wake to watch the dawn
And stay to feel the squall –
They think it all an Accident –
The Melody – you spill –
They never knew – you risked the kill –
The talon’s itch – to tear
Your breastbone from your gizzard –
They never felt – the Fear –
Or how he lashed at you – you fled
And nursed an open Gash –
Where the spinney was too sharp
For sparrowhawks – to rush –
And when you spurned your Self for Song
They never knew you bled –
They thought you spilled your Genius
Like feathers – blithely shed –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
At ebbing tide the Osprey bathes
Breast-deep where the River
Meets the glassy Estuary –
Feathers all a-quiver –
And everything about her speaks
Of relish in her splashing –
She takes a bow and ducks her head –
Heedless – in her washing –
Of all my joy behind the screen
Of leaves and tangled branches –
Her eye – bespattered – nictitates
Behind her feathered lashes –
So when she staggers into flight
Amid a dreamy haze –
I fear that something in her feels
The prying Human Gaze –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The summons of the Whistling Kite
Is plaintive in the air
Beyond the paperbarks along
The estuary shore –
She draws me to the hill of grass
From all attachments – torn
Like spindrift – in bewilderment –
On Country – not my own –
And wheels above me unafraid
Fixing me with an Eye
Fawn as all her plumage –
And banks – and wheels away.
As thermals spread her primaries
She eagles into space –
I turn to see an Osprey
Launching – into grace –
And with two Miracles aloft –
Where yearning – never lands –
I do not know – quite where to look –
Or where to point – the lens –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Waterdance is like a Cloud
Of Starlings in the Dusk
That turn – return – and scud away –
Coalesce and whisk
Across a Sky or Water
Fluid in their Flight –
A flowing Choreography –
A Multitude afloat –
They chase about haphazard –
Whisper – and are gone –
And though each Brain is lucid
A Million are as One –
You might think that the scudding
Is purposeless – or blind –
Yet never once colliding –
The Starlings – and the Wind –
Are ordered by the Heavens
To pull off such a Feat
And make a pure Perfection
Of Chaos so complete.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020. The title was suggested by Simone Keane.
I saw an osprey shake herself
As hounds do - but in flight -
Bedraggled as she rose aloft.
She shuddered and she fought
To add a foot of altitude
So she could clear a tree
Feathers tangled like a mop
As droplets flew astray -
What was sleek turned scrawny
What was ordered - frayed -
And though I stared a moment
I had to look - away -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I heard a Wind wreath round the House
Buffeting the Windows -
And watched it blow the Wrens beyond
And hurl about the Swallows -
But there were Crows who flew in queues
To an updraft by the Road -
And catapulted into it
Unheeding any Dread -
And cawed their Thanks out to the Gale
That flung them into Sky -
That sent them reeling into Rain
And tore the World - away -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Happiness is an ebbing Tide
Relinquishing the Shore
And should it draw me further yet
The Precipice is sheer –
And drops down to a dark abode
Where Dignity is slight
Where all its toothy denizens
Must carry their own light
And cast it on the gloom ahead
Yet dare not look – beneath –
Lest the glistening reveal
A Multitude – of Teeth.
What use have I – for Happiness –
Withdrawing with the flow –
Though Tide is sure – it’s sure to come
And just as sure – to go –
Though I might labour to create
Or clamour to be free –
What fool would hope for Constancy
In Dreams as deep – as Sea?
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Between the Swallow and her Nest
In mid-step – I must pause
To keep the equilibrium
Restrain the gasp – of Praise –
Like surface tension at the brim
She quivers – set to spill –
I will myself – invisible –
To hold her – for a Spell –
Perhaps it lasts – Eternity –
And somewhere – we’re still There –
She a-teeter on the Verge –
Me – all breathless Care.
I lost myself to Heaven
Where this is ever True –
Me – I never moved again –
And no! She never flew –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Here is the Osprey’s vantage point –
She perches to survey
Her principality of Air.
The Talons that destroy
Claw her Treetop – tentative –
By Wings – held half aloft –
Of oystercatchers – herons – gulls –
Heedless – or aloof –
She never sits up here to eat –
A stump will serve for that –
But to breathe the Wind awhile
Her fierce eyes lost in thought –
Until her Mate flies draggle-wet
A fish turned in his Talons
To face the breeze – and now she laughs
And tears away – the Silence –
And though her Tree died long ago –
Salted by the Flood –
It thrills beneath her Claw – and sparks
A Firestorm in my Blood.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Reflecting rose - the surface flows
Backwards to slack-water -
And egrets wade unruffled glaze
Emerging out - of winter.
Could I stalk as still as them -
My movement scarce a flicker -
I could vanish into white
Lost in light and lustre -
Until an unsuspecting shoal
Make the surface shudder
And my whiplash neck comes down -
At its tip - a dagger -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Life is a smudging in darkness
When the attention slips -
And light is strewn across the Deep -
As condensation drips
Down a drizzled window-pane -
A runnelling of colour -
A fleeting piquancy - on tongue -
A smattering - of odour -
And nothing will remember
The time we have not spared -
Still - I stagger - drunk on this -
A Moment can be - smeared -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Sunspots open up their mouths
As if they were alive -
As beaks of starfish - or minute
Stomata - on a leaf -
So telescope and microscope
Reveal it all - alike -
There is a Hunger haggling
Everywhere you look -
And I could drown in Chlorophyll
Or in the dark of Fire -
If Death will kiss me either way -
What use have I - for fear -
Who born - by mouth - must die - by mouth
And go as I begin -
Irrelevance - writ large or small -
Eternally sucked in -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020. Inspired by images of sunspots taken by GREGOR, the largest solar telescope in Europe.
A turban shell half-fossilised
Enamel stripped away -
Scaled with layers of oyster crust
The Deep could not destroy -
Scooped out of congealing Silt
By Storms our Hubris caused -
Sits upon an oaken Shelf -
A Coil the Ocean cast -
We tend the Art of treasuring
A worn Museum Piece
Until we make of every Shell
A Relic torn - from Place -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A heavy pruning of the Vine
Brings it close to Death -
Obedient branches and a stem
Above a weedless Earth
Scarcely seem a Plant at all -
When the leaves are gone
I think the stripped-down structure is
More like a Skeleton -
And when the grapes grow premature
They are untimely nipped
As Poets’ fruits - importunate -
By Criticism - stopped -
Or by an Audience limited
Or hemmed by walls - of Sky -
Or by reason’s Secateurs
Forbidding me - to stray -
But that is why I gnarl myself
Refusing - quite - to die +
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Distraction - is a Thicket
Where no path ever wound -
Nor tree-fall let in sunlight
But everywhere is Wood -
No understorey grows there -
All is tangled brown -
The fallen seeds lie dormant
Where Thought has never - grown -
And where there is no Centre
And no Extremity -
The Word is formed by formlessness
And Voice is never - me -
But Birds - which know each Tree apart -
As Adjective - or Noun -
Will sing the Verb - Identify -
Though I am but - Anon -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Nerve which makes the Eyelid twitch
And yearn for shrouding Night
Connects discretely with the tongue
That whispers grimly – Nought –
And Longing finds its Lodge in me –
A Flutter and a Breath –
A yawning to engulf the Dark –
Devour the whole – of Death.
Slice me open – you’ll not find –
Beneath the Mask of Face
A clue to what provoked the Twitch
Or motive for the Force –
But only Tissue – bare-exposed –
No Tick that caused the Itch –
And then it will be vain to grieve –
Twice as vain – to stitch –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020. The picture is adapted from an engraving of the facial and acoustic nerves, 1852.
I walk to meet two paperbarks
Uprooted by a Tide -
Sepia as broth - or tea -
And frothing at my tread
On sand that sinks beneath my soles.
They lean on ashen limbs -
These ancients with their roots aslant
And bleached. The structure looms -
A silhouette - and questing still
Though disgorged out of ground
Like every hope - still beautiful -
And clean - and pure - and drowned -
And like a hope - disconsolate -
Stripped of flower and leaf -
A wreckage of the Actual -
Beyond the scope - of Grief -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Bole-bark – green leaf – lichen – rock –
Are fundamental truths –
There is no culture can usurp
The reign of undergrowth –
Though we rage at it and raze –
And cry – Eradicate –
Bole-bark – green leaf – lichen – rock –
Are staunch – and they can wait –
And wait – and wait – to reign – again
When sovereignty is ceded –
From the land which ruled us – all –
It’s us who have been – weeded –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I sat out in the wind today -
Some see this as a Fault -
To revel in the rippling grass -
Throw back my hair - exult -
But I saw gulls seized by the Sky
Who let themselves be whirled
Over spume-white waters
Surrendered - to the Wild -
A little plover hit a gust
So fast - it flipped him over -
Then scudded squealing with delight
Enraptured by real Weather -
The osprey taloning her post
Was jubilant as I -
Humans hid behind their Walls
As we tore forth - to die -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Roots – exposed to open air
And seaweed – out of water –
Disinterments of the heart –
Anatomies – of wonder –
Veined organs pulsing free
From the ruptured mound –
Blurtings of mortal words
Gushing through the wound –
Venting of the naked verb
From the yawling throat –
The tongue – transfixed by the barb
Writhes – to gag it – out –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
As it is above the ground -
So it is - below -
Echoing beneath the soil
How the branches - grow -
Until a Tide or tearing Wind
Reveals what Earth has hidden -
Calamity made permanent -
Sculptural and sudden -
And half in Life - half in Death -
We struggle on - in Leaf -
Partly rooted yet - in Joy -
And half-exposed - in Grief -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A heron yawned - a blink ago
Unconscious - unobserved -
A moment’s reflex that disturbed
The stillness of the bird
Enough to send the fish she watched
Scudding from the shallows
Ogling with blinkless eyes
From the cooler hollows -
And all was stasis once again -
The whiplash throat too still -
And so to stay a wordless day -
Then strike - then spear - then spill -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A Songbird flew straight through our fence -
Her wings were timed to close
As she shot between the Wires -
She perched - began to scold
With little needle-breaths of song
Keener than her claws -
Her sharps and flats were quite the tune
To scare away the cold -
And tailor turned to alchemist -
Nimble on her toes
She pinned her singing to the Sun
Transmuting air - to gold.
Transmuting air to gold - I sing
In notes that have no scores
And so the soul escapes the Wires
And what was solid - thaws -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
An oystercatcher whistling
Above the rasp of terns -
Squabblings of roosting birds
On shores - in huddled forms -
And every human tucked away
Safe - behind a wall -
That is when we like to walk
And darkness makes us - whole -
Where ancient moorings stand unused -
The glaze reflects no hulls -
Nothing stirring but the swirls
In dreams of folded gulls -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I read an augury in shells
Worn to naked spirals
Cast upon the shingles –
Helixes and sigils –
Questing structures – curlicues
Wrought in almost-stone –
Corkscrew relics – empty coils
Death’s remainders – strung
Along a shore by churning spume –
Their softer parts destroyed –
Ground to powder in the surge
Or augering – the sand –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Nine swans flew above my head
In a garrulous skein
Shuffling places as they sang
Plaintive songs - of rain -
Questing throats turned to the east
Tilting into sun
Black melodious compass blades
Here - and far - and gone -
And nothing mattered. There I stayed
Through a pathless day -
None of which was real to me -
Direction - slipped - away -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020
We never pruned the Rose - last year -
It grew - straight - through the Winter -
Gable-height - the unkempt form
It forged of Soil and Water
Like a Poem - Painting - Life
Begun - inside a Frame -
It forgot the Sketch - or Seed -
That it started - from -
So now - untrammelled - Roses bloom -
Couplets to cure Sorrow -
Dabs of Petal in the Dark
At the upstairs Window.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Dried blossoms thatched to make a nest
An aperture for a branch –
I found it on a sandy path
That wound up from a beach –
And where the chicks once strained their necks
And huddled down together
Fur plucked out of Banksia cones
Meticulously gathered
Made their mattress – snug as wool –
Delicate as velvet –
The nest lives on my dressing table –
Of all things – I love it
Most like a poem weaved with craft –
Its treasures safely hidden –
And though you never sailed a sea
And scarce strayed from your garden
Of anyone who ever lived
I wish that you could hold
Such exquisite artistry
In your trembling hand –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
It sheds them in abundance –
Dropped profligate – like leaves –
Rows of pale serrations
Barbed – for stealing lives –
Some ripped out by the threshing
Some torn free and awash
Some lost in ocean canyons
Some tossed up on the beach
Arrowheads of ivory
Worn edgeless by the swell
All their powers of murder
Blunted by the squall –
And all the shark’s wild hunger
Eroded by the land –
A splinter from the Hell-mouth –
Harmless – in my Hand –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I learned what it was like to love
And shall expect no more -
Should you say - You are yet young -
Why, then - I must demur -
For if one love was of my life
Then curtains - it is through -
And if my life was for one love
What use have I - for two?
One thought - only - vexes me -
And there can be no balm -
Life for love - I’d gladly give -
Yet you hold me to blame.
I learned what it was like - to love -
You held back - and I yearned -
I waited for eleven years
And in the twelfth - I turned -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Life tore me - from my moorings
And hurled me on a shore
For peace was not my harbour
Nor certainty - my share -
And nor was Life intended
For me - but for the gull -
It gave me only tempests
And shipworms in my hull -
And rammed my gunwale inward
Thrust into foreign land
And man and Life turned vandal
And choked my hatch with sand -
So while the gull untethered
Flies over me - awash
Life undermines my timbers
And Fate - swoops in to lash -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The moment that the osprey strikes
She gambles on her strength -
A fish may equal her for weight
And vie with her for length -
Her talons - barbed - cannot withdraw
But sink into the skin
And flex and clench and wedge themselves
Deeper - deeper in.
A fish - emerging from the murk -
A wager and a wonder -
Might turn scale and plunge again
To drag an osprey under -
So sky and water may invert -
Watch - bird - what you pray -
“Provide, provide” too well affirmed
Turns predator to prey.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Some - like butterflies locked in dark -
Batter their imprisoned souls
Against the glassy gleam of dusk
In skylights smeared with scales -
And on the floor - snapped antennae -
Tattered shreds of wing.
Desperation to fly free
Leaves their limbs unstrung -
But never gladder - larval soul -
Are you who calm to this -
And curling inward, grow so still
You turn - to chrysalis -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Two wagtails dance amid the rain
The lawn turned half to flood
Wafting on their open tails
Though other birds have fled –
And nothing weighs or wets them through –
They flit – as on a breath –
One wrestles worms from sodden turf
One dips and takes a bath
Emerging from the puddle sleek –
A harlequin – whose mind
Is free from all our “Thou shalt nots”
And unbesmirched – by mud –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
They say they will slow down for you
And yet somehow – they won’t –
But forge ahead relentlessly
Like soldiers at some front –
Objectiveless – yet ever driven
Though purpose – now – is gone
And though they claim to care for you
They drag you – on – and on –
Toward a mirage that recedes –
The wraith of “happiness” –
Travailing through the wire and mud
And never stoop – to bless –
Or ever stop to watch the lark
That sings above the trench –
Obsessed with one forlorn success
Which ends in death – and stench –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I watched as ant confronted ant
Their compound eyes abulge
With four antennae - all aslant -
And bodies poised - to barge -
Their territories only stones -
Dimensions - but a yard -
I heard - I thought - their mortal groans
Each mandible a sword -
Yet neither soldier ever touched -
They posed - then walked away -
Perhaps they were too finely matched
To risk a mortal fray -
Or perhaps I read them wrong -
Their feelers’ semaphore
More akin to lovers’ song
Than drumstick-rolls - of war -
Go to the ant - the prophecy -
I wish that human-kind
Had half the ants’ sagacity
Or half the strength - of mind -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Listen – golden whistler –
cicadas in the haze –
peppermints a whisper
enchanting me – to doze –
awakening – in winter –
to chase the vanished call
and everywhere I wander –
human faces – cruel.
I’m gone astray – and wilder
stripped of hope – and trust –
left with only wonder
at warmth so quickly lost –
and go – a golden whistler –
voiceless in the dark
where love is but a whisper –
humanity – a Spark –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2019.
I notice a cicada nymph
latched upon the bark
escaped its skin last night –
that slit is where it broke
out into the starlit warmth,
retracting arms and claws
to flex them, hooked and finely toothed
as pliers or champing jaws,
and I have bent to tilt my world
to meet those empty eyes –
up above he strops his legs,
sucks the sap and flies –
he’s left behind this amber crisp,
jettisoned and dead:
a sculpture strangely animate
though all the life has fled –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2019.
In the Dark Eden there was no Fall -
nor was there night or day
that could be counted - it was all
stasis - no God drove us away.
In the Dark Eden there was no Death -
nor was there Earth nor Sky
nor Serpent. The primal alabaster Breath
became a Butterfly.
In the Dark Eden there was no Man
to dream of Babel’s tower -
because there was no master-plan
a Bird became a Flower.
In the Dark Eden, no Creator
cleaved us from the Tree -
nor was there anything between
the Fern - and You - and Me.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2019.
At the start are weft and warp
strung out taut and trim.
Sett and pivot leave their tartan
woven into time.
Twill weaves round the warp, and time
is touched by tone and line.
Colours cross – junctures meet –
textures intertwine –
and we are held within the weft –
contingent, incomplete –
purposeless amid the plaid
unless – perchance – we meet –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2018
I saw a spider nurse a fly
Gently into doom,
Cradled in a shroud of silk -
It quivered in a dream,
And deep in its narcotic doze
No pain could touch the fly -
Though soon its body was a shell,
Emptied, crisp and dry -
But I’ve seen human torturers
Who thrive on only hurt,
Who shroud their wakeful victims
In acid webs of hate,
Who show the spider merciful
And thrive on being despised -
I’m stunned by human cruelty -
Yet dare not be surprised.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2017.
Readings of some of these poems are here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
He climbs inside - Volcanoes -
When we - evacuate -
He tests - and takes - the Temperature -
To catch it - in a Chart -
His Payment - astronomical -
The Danger - most Extreme -
He plots the welling - Pressure -
The superficial - Calm -
An open Heart - revealing
A deeper - laval - Glow -
A Prophecy - foretelling
Pyroclastic - Flow -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2021. For Angus Miller.
The Peacock she embroidered
Is still - alive -
The Frame his Hands have fashioned
Is all his Love -
The Peacock - tilts to touch them -
The Blush - of Blooms -
Skies - in Eyes of Feathers -
His Tail - festoons -
Beyond the Frame - Hydrangeas
Be held - in Glass -
Confuse - what is Eternal
And what must pass -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2021.
And then the Rose burst into Leaf
Beneath each savage Cut -
Leaves the red of Rust - or Blood -
Their Growth borne out - of Hurt -
So we slice through Life and Height
To thicken out the Stulp -
Wielding ruthless Secateurs -
Remorseless in our Grip.
The more we hack - the more she grows
More strong where she is hurt -
A Blade to force the Bud - to split -
And rout the Fungus - out -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I pruned the Rose today - at last -
And only left one Bud -
A Blight was spattering the Leaves
With darkened Drops - of blood -
Now she stands - disfigured sticks -
One Twig - remains unscathed -
It bears the lonely signs of Life -
Haphazard Mercy - saved -
So all the other Flowers wilt -
Their ragged Petals stripped -
Each Calyx withers into Brown
The scarlet Hip is - stopped.
Sentiment’s a fickle thing -
I choose which Flowers must die
And later leap to slay - a Flea -
Or save - a Butterfly -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Chrysalis - dissolves the Grub -
Into a flux - of Life -
Spines and eyes and segments steep
In Ferment - stripped of Self -
Yet wings and thorax - head and tongue
Emboss the promised Form
Upon the Crust of Chrysalis -
Its Destiny - a Charm -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Window where I like to work
Looks out upon the Rose
Whose Briars rise beyond
And bloom above my height.
A Bedhead - made of brass - we placed
Once - for a plot of Peas
But now it leans amongst the Herbs
And like a Plant - it grows
In my affections. Sometimes - a Rail
Flicks dust-motes from her tail
Amongst these Leaves - then scatters
Trailing chicks the hue of charcoal -
Or a quenda noses among roots
Snouting neat and conical holes.
Up by the fence - a red Hibiscus -
Below - a Bobtail licks her scales
And ferns block out the sunlight
Or Peppermints leave it laced
With shadows. A Lavender
Makes knops of Purple -
Lemon Balm - a calming Simple -
And Marigolds - marrying gold
To green - jostle with Lemongrass -
As Mountain Thyme creeps between.
A flash of Wrens seems to blend
With Agapanthus - Poppies’ shreds
Wilt in summer - Blackflies gather
On the Mint and Balm - and rise
Like tornadoes at the Watering.
When Dusk is on its way
I look again - there glows
Our Orchid-coloured lampshade
Reflected in the Rose.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Hovering - on the Edges -
The Kestrel - in my head -
Melts into a Brightness-
Becomes a vivid - Wood -
Detailed - to the leaf-veins -
Quivering - with Growth -
Hallowed - out of Harvest -
Echoing - with Truth -
Vibrant - to the Axils -
Shimmering - beyond -
Melting - and condensing
Into - a Bracken Frond -
The Leaf becomes a Feather -
The Twig - becomes a Bone -
And Frond returns - to Kestrel -
She flies me - deeper - Home -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Butterfly’s Soliloquy
Is Breath and Wind - and Lift -
A Wish - dispelling Gravity -
To send - a Soul - aloft -
I hear it - like a Feather
Floating - from a Bird -
It utters - without speaking -
And means - without a word -
It hushes with an Updraft -
It brushes - through the Light -
It spirals - into Sunshine -
Exhales - and is lost -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A Blur of Cobalt - Bead - of Eye -
Behind a screen of leaves
Is all that we shall see today
Of how he - fleeting - lives -
Between interstices - of Twigs -
A sidestep - into flight -
A hawk or raven’s claw - from Death -
And every moment - fraught -
Who yesterday was swelled - with Pluck -
And brazen on the Lawn
Snapped up Midges - at a flit -
Then scattered down the Lane.
Perhaps some Shadow hovered
And darkened - as he flew -
So now he is at pains - to hide
Extravagance - of Blue -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Silence is not loved enough -
We break it - at a whim -
Not content with Wilderness -
The wideness - of the Wind -
The muffled flight - of Nightjars -
The whisper of the Dusk -
The quivering of whiskers -
The glaze - upon a Lake.
If you - once - heard their engines
Revved merciless - to tear
The stillness from the Twilight
As fingernails - rend hair -
And heard the Tranquil murdered
As talons crush - a mouse -
You’d hold your upstairs Window
As sacrosanct - your House
Would be your only Haven
From chainsaws - raceways - roads -
We took the Tulle of Nature
And roared it - into shreds -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Pale exhaustion made me lie
With clouds - across my gaze -
Sunlight made them dissipate
Like threads teased out - of gauze -
Vanishing into a Sky
So vast - it drowned my mind -
And every thought I ever had
Was scorched - in solar Wind -
And in that Blue - at last beheld
With Eye - the end of I -
I watched a World - evaporate -
In depths that swallowed - me -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Cicada easing from the Shell
Unsheathing all her Limbs –
Her Crust of Chitin – jettisoned –
Becomes the frame she climbs –
A sexless Exoskeleton –
Exquisite empty Cast –
And she a Denizen of Night –
A Life the Dew has kissed –
Who breathes through open Spiracles –
Who stares through Eyes of Froth –
Who soon will stridulate her Praise
Of Earth – that thrust her forth –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I found a shell so riddled
It seemed to be - of Lace -
More Air than solid Substance -
Less Permanence - than Loss -
The Bobbins that had made it
Were Shipworms - and the Sand -
I stopped to find its Filigree
Had crushed - inside my hand -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Black Swans under Thunderclouds
Score wakes upon the Silver -
Bodies ink - faces nibs -
Etching out - the Weather -
Each bill tipped - with Cochineal -
To tilt - toward the Storm -
Embodiments of Shadowings -
Dark Promisers - of Dawn -
I wish that you could watch our Swans
Swim Night into our Day -
As if it were not Life - to live -
Nor even Death - to die -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Then - is the End of Knowing -
Cold - is the Unknown - When -
Done - with the Work of shining -
Constellations - None -
Dark - as a Globe - upturning
Over a Ground - undone -
Moon - and the Snow - obscuring -
White - melting into - Gone -
Black - is the Flame unguessing -
Never - the Light - again -
Hope - is the Face - averting -
Turning the Eyes from - Then -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I saw the Children crouching low -
Their cheeks between their knees -
Intently staring at the sand -
And - ruffled by the breeze -
A little Puddle full of brine.
I stopped to see the cause -
Spindling amid the silt
A Prawn - with heavy Claws -
Each of them an algal green
And shunted up ahead -
A pale - aloof - transparent Thing.
Seized with mortal Dread
It spurted - sudden as a flinch -
And shot into a Hole
As though it feared to be plucked
From Home - and swallowed whole.
I shot Home too - within the Hour -
Propelled - in my own right -
Tender-shelled and burden-clawed
Launched into - Respite.
Life can be a curious Child -
How prawnlike I can be
When its shadow looms too close
And bends - to poke - at me -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
An antique Compass on a chain
Encompasses my throat -
The Needle - ever quivering -
Circumscribes - a Nought -
I hold it up before my Eye -
The Iris spanned - across -
Whirling to disorient -
The Pupil darts - off Course -
Cards conspire to confuse -
Coordinates - compel -
Now there is no further North
Encircling - a Pole -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I hid behind the Curtains –
He flushed me – into Sight –
I scampered down the Hallway –
Invoked the Dark – of Night –
He blundered – into Tables –
I hid – behind a Chair –
He paused to light – a Lantern –
I was – no longer – There –
I hunched myself – beneath a Bed –
I felt the Mattress pitch –
I knew he sat above me now –
And kept a Spider’s watch –
I heard his Pulse – I smelt his Rage –
His Incandescence – burned –
Then he stood – astride my World –
My Darkness – overturned –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A soft Cicada - fresh emerged
Is rose-pink and tender -
Freshly conjured out of Liquid
Buried all the Winter -
Resting on a Superstructure
Crisp as fallen leaf -
Fragile to a poking finger -
Husk - of fleeting Life -
Beyond conjecture - her Achievement -
A Toil nobody sees -
Pale - unmoving - one more Moment -
Dreaming Roots - of Trees -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
We’ve been interred - a Century -
Sisters - Father - Mother -
Five Skeletons of common Bone -
Under Flagstones - gathered -
What remains - above the Ground -
Names - engraved in Marble -
Compacted underneath your feet -
Earth - to keep Us humble -
So - we’d slumber ‘til the Judgement
Placid under Stone -
And leave you to your lives - provided
You leave Us alone -
But we scream and rend our Coffins
‘Til our fingernails are split -
Now We are alone - our Father
Grubbed out of soil and grit -
Flee - and leave the Church door open -
Run aghast - in living dread -
Out into the bleeding Silence -
Jolly Robin - lying dead -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I never met a Hummingbird
Whose iridescence flashed
Before my eyes - like nectar’s ghost -
In sugar-questing flight -
But quiver-plumaged flickerings
Bright ephemeral forms -
Electricities - of Wrens -
Cobalt hearts - of flames.
You and I - though “introverts” -
As long as we draw breath
Live for mundane miracles
Familiar - to both -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A Mist can make a Mountain float –
Reflected upside-down –
As egrets stir the mirror-glazed
Surface of the Dawn –
Obliterate a cityscape
Behind a veil of light –
And leave the Heart sequestered
In ecstasies – of Sight –
Where every line is simplified
And every ripple – smoothed –
And solitary – Soul – exult –
In rising Vapours – breathed!
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
By imperceptible degree
We die - if not by shock -
No remedy - it will not do
To spike the nerveless Clock -
Or ram a needle through the spokes
Or try to break the teeth
Of cogs cut out of Adamant
Or hold the Piece beneath
Some torrent - for it will not drown
Nor yet submit - to wrath -
But hardly noticed - drive the Hand
That ticks us out - to Death -
A pendulum - impervious -
Sways dauntless - ever on -
Until machine mortality’s
The only thing not - gone -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
When we were deep in trespassing
We came upon a mound
The termites heaved up out of soil –
A hive of art – and mind –
Orchids stippled at its base
Stems thrust into ochre –
Tubers swelled beside the Queen
In her forbidden acre.
Hidden our meandering ways
As roots that twist in earth
Until a flagrant flowering
In unbidden – growth –
Sung its sunlight into space
Through every dappled hollow
And marked the ground where none may go
Jubilant – in yellow –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I feel a Leather compassing
About my bleeding Mind
And Someone drew the Buckle - in -
I cannot clutch - to mend -
I sense it hanging - like a Shroud
From the flexing Strap -
Blinded by a Tightening
That never deigns - to Stop -
Tyrant of my screeching Soul
Who blots - with stunning Light -
My holy Dark - in negative -
Searing into - White -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I throw my Inspiration – out –
It falls – to a Black Hole –
The Word can only whirl about
Extinguishment – of Soul –
The circuit of my World – is flung
Into hungry Dark –
With all the Beauty – all the Art –
Every human Work –
Yet in the very Vortex – look –
It flies – on fragile Wings –
The Fragment indestructible
Enduring all our Wrongs –
Airborne Tissue – veined for strength –
Alive – and ever sought –
Elusive – tangible – untamed –
Through the blast – of Nought –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Where the gold-green Mirror Tree
Is leaning into Sun
A Beetle of Enamel sleeps
As Whistlers smelt their Song.
The Rose spots her Elytra –
Dimpled at the edges
With lines of perfect pinpricks
Small as Eyes – of Midges –
Yet with your withering poisons
I see you stoop – to spray –
I wonder how – such Gildings! –
You bear to look – away –
What eye could close undaunted
And who could turn aloof?
I swear – I fairly staggered –
Bedazzled so – with Leaf –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I saw a Type of Butterfly
Not seen since – as a Boy –
I glimpsed one at a Nettle-bed
And chased it on its Way –
And glimpsing as it flitted
In and out of Light
How the Sun reflected
Off flashing Wings – I sought –
The Velvet of its Burgundy
The Sulphur in its Splash
Melting into Shadow-glades –
A Child’s fleeting Wish –
And here it is – enduring
On Blossoms of the Lime –
That bright Glimpse of the Imago
Untainted yet – by Time –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020. The butterfly is Vanessa itea.
I learned a line – of cruelty –
Too offhand to recite –
Because it will not scan – with Love –
I stutter – to relate –
How it tore the heart from Truth
And fed it – to the flies –
Made a mockery of Hope –
Proclaimed as Gospel – lies –
It sought to staunch the singing Bird
With a throttling hand
And throw it to the howling crowd
Who scorned – to understand.
When coffins of Humanity
With unctuous flags – are draped –
I marvel that the verse survived
Or that the Bird – escaped –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
When Cockatoos come to our trees
To probe grubs under bark
And all the Grove creaks with the calls
Of wild things on the Brink –
With voices of split Hakea pods
And Banksias’ pursed beaks
And Grass-Tree foliage in the rasps –
The Grove resounds – with Cracks –
Of splintered bark in plier-sharp bills –
It’s then I wonder – why –
Humans stoop to scorn each other –
Interrupt – and lie –
Or worse that – incarcerate –
The Ravaged One – who flees –
If hate grows from too little time
Spent staring – into trees –
If Cockatoos glimpsed – through the leaves –
Could probe our hatreds – yet –
Like grubs that tunnel under bark –
Ere Evil wipes – us – out –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I like a Bee – for Industry
More than other workers
For something in her Business
Has time to pause – for Wonders –
And there’s a Serendipity
About her waggling way –
Refracted by – Kaleidoscopes –
In her compound eye.
One flower – she sees – a hundred times –
It lets the Nectar run –
She steals a certain Leisure to
Distil it – with the Sun –
Inspiration’s accident –
Fermented – out of Light –
Is Honey that can rarely – be –
Brewed well – by flying – straight –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
High up the beach – there is mudstone –
Solid and pitted with holes –
I half-think stone crabs must have built them
Of silt – and of powder – of shells –
But Science still masters me – sometimes –
With questions – like – How will it end –
Will petrification work faster
Than water wears stone into sand –
Or will high tide and sediment ever
Make as they mar – equally –
Mudflats in stasis with mudstone
‘Til mountains are cast into sea?
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
An Apple - sheds a ribboned peel -
The skin retains a curl
The shape of all Encompassing -
Fresh now - soon to spoil -
Pale of flesh and bright of skin -
Juice-wet and exposed -
Coiled upon a cutting-block -
Not yet - oxidised -
Wait - and hold the breath - a spell -
Let this be - Enough -
A paring to perfection - spilled
From the whetted Knife -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The heron brings both her feet forward
In the very last moments of flight -
And now that I’m coming here always
She closes her wings unafraid.
I think how I once nursed a fledgling
And wonder - perhaps this is she -
Who eyes me alert and unnerving
And holds the fish under her sway -
And if I once held her to feed her -
I hold her now - poised to land -
And she holds the right to ignore me
An inch before touching - the ground -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
How easy – to be overlooked –
As Nightingales – are drab –
Despite your incandescent voice
Obscurity – can’t curb –
And though you wake to watch the dawn
And stay to feel the squall –
They think it all an Accident –
The Melody – you spill –
They never knew – you risked the kill –
The talon’s itch – to tear
Your breastbone from your gizzard –
They never felt – the Fear –
Or how he lashed at you – you fled
And nursed an open Gash –
Where the spinney was too sharp
For sparrowhawks – to rush –
And when you spurned your Self for Song
They never knew you bled –
They thought you spilled your Genius
Like feathers – blithely shed –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
At ebbing tide the Osprey bathes
Breast-deep where the River
Meets the glassy Estuary –
Feathers all a-quiver –
And everything about her speaks
Of relish in her splashing –
She takes a bow and ducks her head –
Heedless – in her washing –
Of all my joy behind the screen
Of leaves and tangled branches –
Her eye – bespattered – nictitates
Behind her feathered lashes –
So when she staggers into flight
Amid a dreamy haze –
I fear that something in her feels
The prying Human Gaze –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The summons of the Whistling Kite
Is plaintive in the air
Beyond the paperbarks along
The estuary shore –
She draws me to the hill of grass
From all attachments – torn
Like spindrift – in bewilderment –
On Country – not my own –
And wheels above me unafraid
Fixing me with an Eye
Fawn as all her plumage –
And banks – and wheels away.
As thermals spread her primaries
She eagles into space –
I turn to see an Osprey
Launching – into grace –
And with two Miracles aloft –
Where yearning – never lands –
I do not know – quite where to look –
Or where to point – the lens –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Waterdance is like a Cloud
Of Starlings in the Dusk
That turn – return – and scud away –
Coalesce and whisk
Across a Sky or Water
Fluid in their Flight –
A flowing Choreography –
A Multitude afloat –
They chase about haphazard –
Whisper – and are gone –
And though each Brain is lucid
A Million are as One –
You might think that the scudding
Is purposeless – or blind –
Yet never once colliding –
The Starlings – and the Wind –
Are ordered by the Heavens
To pull off such a Feat
And make a pure Perfection
Of Chaos so complete.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020. The title was suggested by Simone Keane.
I saw an osprey shake herself
As hounds do - but in flight -
Bedraggled as she rose aloft.
She shuddered and she fought
To add a foot of altitude
So she could clear a tree
Feathers tangled like a mop
As droplets flew astray -
What was sleek turned scrawny
What was ordered - frayed -
And though I stared a moment
I had to look - away -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I heard a Wind wreath round the House
Buffeting the Windows -
And watched it blow the Wrens beyond
And hurl about the Swallows -
But there were Crows who flew in queues
To an updraft by the Road -
And catapulted into it
Unheeding any Dread -
And cawed their Thanks out to the Gale
That flung them into Sky -
That sent them reeling into Rain
And tore the World - away -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Happiness is an ebbing Tide
Relinquishing the Shore
And should it draw me further yet
The Precipice is sheer –
And drops down to a dark abode
Where Dignity is slight
Where all its toothy denizens
Must carry their own light
And cast it on the gloom ahead
Yet dare not look – beneath –
Lest the glistening reveal
A Multitude – of Teeth.
What use have I – for Happiness –
Withdrawing with the flow –
Though Tide is sure – it’s sure to come
And just as sure – to go –
Though I might labour to create
Or clamour to be free –
What fool would hope for Constancy
In Dreams as deep – as Sea?
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Between the Swallow and her Nest
In mid-step – I must pause
To keep the equilibrium
Restrain the gasp – of Praise –
Like surface tension at the brim
She quivers – set to spill –
I will myself – invisible –
To hold her – for a Spell –
Perhaps it lasts – Eternity –
And somewhere – we’re still There –
She a-teeter on the Verge –
Me – all breathless Care.
I lost myself to Heaven
Where this is ever True –
Me – I never moved again –
And no! She never flew –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Here is the Osprey’s vantage point –
She perches to survey
Her principality of Air.
The Talons that destroy
Claw her Treetop – tentative –
By Wings – held half aloft –
Of oystercatchers – herons – gulls –
Heedless – or aloof –
She never sits up here to eat –
A stump will serve for that –
But to breathe the Wind awhile
Her fierce eyes lost in thought –
Until her Mate flies draggle-wet
A fish turned in his Talons
To face the breeze – and now she laughs
And tears away – the Silence –
And though her Tree died long ago –
Salted by the Flood –
It thrills beneath her Claw – and sparks
A Firestorm in my Blood.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Reflecting rose - the surface flows
Backwards to slack-water -
And egrets wade unruffled glaze
Emerging out - of winter.
Could I stalk as still as them -
My movement scarce a flicker -
I could vanish into white
Lost in light and lustre -
Until an unsuspecting shoal
Make the surface shudder
And my whiplash neck comes down -
At its tip - a dagger -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Life is a smudging in darkness
When the attention slips -
And light is strewn across the Deep -
As condensation drips
Down a drizzled window-pane -
A runnelling of colour -
A fleeting piquancy - on tongue -
A smattering - of odour -
And nothing will remember
The time we have not spared -
Still - I stagger - drunk on this -
A Moment can be - smeared -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Sunspots open up their mouths
As if they were alive -
As beaks of starfish - or minute
Stomata - on a leaf -
So telescope and microscope
Reveal it all - alike -
There is a Hunger haggling
Everywhere you look -
And I could drown in Chlorophyll
Or in the dark of Fire -
If Death will kiss me either way -
What use have I - for fear -
Who born - by mouth - must die - by mouth
And go as I begin -
Irrelevance - writ large or small -
Eternally sucked in -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020. Inspired by images of sunspots taken by GREGOR, the largest solar telescope in Europe.
A turban shell half-fossilised
Enamel stripped away -
Scaled with layers of oyster crust
The Deep could not destroy -
Scooped out of congealing Silt
By Storms our Hubris caused -
Sits upon an oaken Shelf -
A Coil the Ocean cast -
We tend the Art of treasuring
A worn Museum Piece
Until we make of every Shell
A Relic torn - from Place -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A heavy pruning of the Vine
Brings it close to Death -
Obedient branches and a stem
Above a weedless Earth
Scarcely seem a Plant at all -
When the leaves are gone
I think the stripped-down structure is
More like a Skeleton -
And when the grapes grow premature
They are untimely nipped
As Poets’ fruits - importunate -
By Criticism - stopped -
Or by an Audience limited
Or hemmed by walls - of Sky -
Or by reason’s Secateurs
Forbidding me - to stray -
But that is why I gnarl myself
Refusing - quite - to die +
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Distraction - is a Thicket
Where no path ever wound -
Nor tree-fall let in sunlight
But everywhere is Wood -
No understorey grows there -
All is tangled brown -
The fallen seeds lie dormant
Where Thought has never - grown -
And where there is no Centre
And no Extremity -
The Word is formed by formlessness
And Voice is never - me -
But Birds - which know each Tree apart -
As Adjective - or Noun -
Will sing the Verb - Identify -
Though I am but - Anon -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The Nerve which makes the Eyelid twitch
And yearn for shrouding Night
Connects discretely with the tongue
That whispers grimly – Nought –
And Longing finds its Lodge in me –
A Flutter and a Breath –
A yawning to engulf the Dark –
Devour the whole – of Death.
Slice me open – you’ll not find –
Beneath the Mask of Face
A clue to what provoked the Twitch
Or motive for the Force –
But only Tissue – bare-exposed –
No Tick that caused the Itch –
And then it will be vain to grieve –
Twice as vain – to stitch –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020. The picture is adapted from an engraving of the facial and acoustic nerves, 1852.
I walk to meet two paperbarks
Uprooted by a Tide -
Sepia as broth - or tea -
And frothing at my tread
On sand that sinks beneath my soles.
They lean on ashen limbs -
These ancients with their roots aslant
And bleached. The structure looms -
A silhouette - and questing still
Though disgorged out of ground
Like every hope - still beautiful -
And clean - and pure - and drowned -
And like a hope - disconsolate -
Stripped of flower and leaf -
A wreckage of the Actual -
Beyond the scope - of Grief -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Bole-bark – green leaf – lichen – rock –
Are fundamental truths –
There is no culture can usurp
The reign of undergrowth –
Though we rage at it and raze –
And cry – Eradicate –
Bole-bark – green leaf – lichen – rock –
Are staunch – and they can wait –
And wait – and wait – to reign – again
When sovereignty is ceded –
From the land which ruled us – all –
It’s us who have been – weeded –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I sat out in the wind today -
Some see this as a Fault -
To revel in the rippling grass -
Throw back my hair - exult -
But I saw gulls seized by the Sky
Who let themselves be whirled
Over spume-white waters
Surrendered - to the Wild -
A little plover hit a gust
So fast - it flipped him over -
Then scudded squealing with delight
Enraptured by real Weather -
The osprey taloning her post
Was jubilant as I -
Humans hid behind their Walls
As we tore forth - to die -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Roots – exposed to open air
And seaweed – out of water –
Disinterments of the heart –
Anatomies – of wonder –
Veined organs pulsing free
From the ruptured mound –
Blurtings of mortal words
Gushing through the wound –
Venting of the naked verb
From the yawling throat –
The tongue – transfixed by the barb
Writhes – to gag it – out –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
As it is above the ground -
So it is - below -
Echoing beneath the soil
How the branches - grow -
Until a Tide or tearing Wind
Reveals what Earth has hidden -
Calamity made permanent -
Sculptural and sudden -
And half in Life - half in Death -
We struggle on - in Leaf -
Partly rooted yet - in Joy -
And half-exposed - in Grief -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A heron yawned - a blink ago
Unconscious - unobserved -
A moment’s reflex that disturbed
The stillness of the bird
Enough to send the fish she watched
Scudding from the shallows
Ogling with blinkless eyes
From the cooler hollows -
And all was stasis once again -
The whiplash throat too still -
And so to stay a wordless day -
Then strike - then spear - then spill -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
A Songbird flew straight through our fence -
Her wings were timed to close
As she shot between the Wires -
She perched - began to scold
With little needle-breaths of song
Keener than her claws -
Her sharps and flats were quite the tune
To scare away the cold -
And tailor turned to alchemist -
Nimble on her toes
She pinned her singing to the Sun
Transmuting air - to gold.
Transmuting air to gold - I sing
In notes that have no scores
And so the soul escapes the Wires
And what was solid - thaws -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
An oystercatcher whistling
Above the rasp of terns -
Squabblings of roosting birds
On shores - in huddled forms -
And every human tucked away
Safe - behind a wall -
That is when we like to walk
And darkness makes us - whole -
Where ancient moorings stand unused -
The glaze reflects no hulls -
Nothing stirring but the swirls
In dreams of folded gulls -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I read an augury in shells
Worn to naked spirals
Cast upon the shingles –
Helixes and sigils –
Questing structures – curlicues
Wrought in almost-stone –
Corkscrew relics – empty coils
Death’s remainders – strung
Along a shore by churning spume –
Their softer parts destroyed –
Ground to powder in the surge
Or augering – the sand –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Nine swans flew above my head
In a garrulous skein
Shuffling places as they sang
Plaintive songs - of rain -
Questing throats turned to the east
Tilting into sun
Black melodious compass blades
Here - and far - and gone -
And nothing mattered. There I stayed
Through a pathless day -
None of which was real to me -
Direction - slipped - away -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020
We never pruned the Rose - last year -
It grew - straight - through the Winter -
Gable-height - the unkempt form
It forged of Soil and Water
Like a Poem - Painting - Life
Begun - inside a Frame -
It forgot the Sketch - or Seed -
That it started - from -
So now - untrammelled - Roses bloom -
Couplets to cure Sorrow -
Dabs of Petal in the Dark
At the upstairs Window.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Dried blossoms thatched to make a nest
An aperture for a branch –
I found it on a sandy path
That wound up from a beach –
And where the chicks once strained their necks
And huddled down together
Fur plucked out of Banksia cones
Meticulously gathered
Made their mattress – snug as wool –
Delicate as velvet –
The nest lives on my dressing table –
Of all things – I love it
Most like a poem weaved with craft –
Its treasures safely hidden –
And though you never sailed a sea
And scarce strayed from your garden
Of anyone who ever lived
I wish that you could hold
Such exquisite artistry
In your trembling hand –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
It sheds them in abundance –
Dropped profligate – like leaves –
Rows of pale serrations
Barbed – for stealing lives –
Some ripped out by the threshing
Some torn free and awash
Some lost in ocean canyons
Some tossed up on the beach
Arrowheads of ivory
Worn edgeless by the swell
All their powers of murder
Blunted by the squall –
And all the shark’s wild hunger
Eroded by the land –
A splinter from the Hell-mouth –
Harmless – in my Hand –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I learned what it was like to love
And shall expect no more -
Should you say - You are yet young -
Why, then - I must demur -
For if one love was of my life
Then curtains - it is through -
And if my life was for one love
What use have I - for two?
One thought - only - vexes me -
And there can be no balm -
Life for love - I’d gladly give -
Yet you hold me to blame.
I learned what it was like - to love -
You held back - and I yearned -
I waited for eleven years
And in the twelfth - I turned -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Life tore me - from my moorings
And hurled me on a shore
For peace was not my harbour
Nor certainty - my share -
And nor was Life intended
For me - but for the gull -
It gave me only tempests
And shipworms in my hull -
And rammed my gunwale inward
Thrust into foreign land
And man and Life turned vandal
And choked my hatch with sand -
So while the gull untethered
Flies over me - awash
Life undermines my timbers
And Fate - swoops in to lash -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
The moment that the osprey strikes
She gambles on her strength -
A fish may equal her for weight
And vie with her for length -
Her talons - barbed - cannot withdraw
But sink into the skin
And flex and clench and wedge themselves
Deeper - deeper in.
A fish - emerging from the murk -
A wager and a wonder -
Might turn scale and plunge again
To drag an osprey under -
So sky and water may invert -
Watch - bird - what you pray -
“Provide, provide” too well affirmed
Turns predator to prey.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Some - like butterflies locked in dark -
Batter their imprisoned souls
Against the glassy gleam of dusk
In skylights smeared with scales -
And on the floor - snapped antennae -
Tattered shreds of wing.
Desperation to fly free
Leaves their limbs unstrung -
But never gladder - larval soul -
Are you who calm to this -
And curling inward, grow so still
You turn - to chrysalis -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Two wagtails dance amid the rain
The lawn turned half to flood
Wafting on their open tails
Though other birds have fled –
And nothing weighs or wets them through –
They flit – as on a breath –
One wrestles worms from sodden turf
One dips and takes a bath
Emerging from the puddle sleek –
A harlequin – whose mind
Is free from all our “Thou shalt nots”
And unbesmirched – by mud –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
They say they will slow down for you
And yet somehow – they won’t –
But forge ahead relentlessly
Like soldiers at some front –
Objectiveless – yet ever driven
Though purpose – now – is gone
And though they claim to care for you
They drag you – on – and on –
Toward a mirage that recedes –
The wraith of “happiness” –
Travailing through the wire and mud
And never stoop – to bless –
Or ever stop to watch the lark
That sings above the trench –
Obsessed with one forlorn success
Which ends in death – and stench –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
I watched as ant confronted ant
Their compound eyes abulge
With four antennae - all aslant -
And bodies poised - to barge -
Their territories only stones -
Dimensions - but a yard -
I heard - I thought - their mortal groans
Each mandible a sword -
Yet neither soldier ever touched -
They posed - then walked away -
Perhaps they were too finely matched
To risk a mortal fray -
Or perhaps I read them wrong -
Their feelers’ semaphore
More akin to lovers’ song
Than drumstick-rolls - of war -
Go to the ant - the prophecy -
I wish that human-kind
Had half the ants’ sagacity
Or half the strength - of mind -
Poem by Giles Watson, 2020.
Listen – golden whistler –
cicadas in the haze –
peppermints a whisper
enchanting me – to doze –
awakening – in winter –
to chase the vanished call
and everywhere I wander –
human faces – cruel.
I’m gone astray – and wilder
stripped of hope – and trust –
left with only wonder
at warmth so quickly lost –
and go – a golden whistler –
voiceless in the dark
where love is but a whisper –
humanity – a Spark –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2019.
I notice a cicada nymph
latched upon the bark
escaped its skin last night –
that slit is where it broke
out into the starlit warmth,
retracting arms and claws
to flex them, hooked and finely toothed
as pliers or champing jaws,
and I have bent to tilt my world
to meet those empty eyes –
up above he strops his legs,
sucks the sap and flies –
he’s left behind this amber crisp,
jettisoned and dead:
a sculpture strangely animate
though all the life has fled –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2019.
In the Dark Eden there was no Fall -
nor was there night or day
that could be counted - it was all
stasis - no God drove us away.
In the Dark Eden there was no Death -
nor was there Earth nor Sky
nor Serpent. The primal alabaster Breath
became a Butterfly.
In the Dark Eden there was no Man
to dream of Babel’s tower -
because there was no master-plan
a Bird became a Flower.
In the Dark Eden, no Creator
cleaved us from the Tree -
nor was there anything between
the Fern - and You - and Me.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2019.
At the start are weft and warp
strung out taut and trim.
Sett and pivot leave their tartan
woven into time.
Twill weaves round the warp, and time
is touched by tone and line.
Colours cross – junctures meet –
textures intertwine –
and we are held within the weft –
contingent, incomplete –
purposeless amid the plaid
unless – perchance – we meet –
Poem by Giles Watson, 2018
I saw a spider nurse a fly
Gently into doom,
Cradled in a shroud of silk -
It quivered in a dream,
And deep in its narcotic doze
No pain could touch the fly -
Though soon its body was a shell,
Emptied, crisp and dry -
But I’ve seen human torturers
Who thrive on only hurt,
Who shroud their wakeful victims
In acid webs of hate,
Who show the spider merciful
And thrive on being despised -
I’m stunned by human cruelty -
Yet dare not be surprised.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2017.
