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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
J.A. Baker
Read between
November 22, 2016 - November 20, 2017
In The Peregrine he wrote: ‘The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.’
but a fragrance of neglect still lingers, like a ghost of fallen grass.
Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky.
Sparrowhawks were always near me in the dusk, like something I meant to say but could never quite remember.
Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all.
The hunter must become the thing he hunts. What is, is now, must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree. Yesterday is dim and monochrome. A week ago you were not born. Persist, endure, follow, watch.
Time is measured by a clock of blood. When one is active, close to the hawk, pursuing, the pulse races, time goes faster; when one is still, waiting, the pulse quietens, time is slow.
it is the memory of a certain fulmination or declension of light that was unique to that time and that place on that day, a memory as vivid to the hunter as burning magnesium.
has been slurred over by those
The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.
Female peregrines, known as falcons,
Males, or tiercels,
Predators overcome their prey by the exploitation of weakness rather than by superior power.
as it spreads out beneath him like a stain of white – that he can never fail to strike.
orchards smelling of vinegary windfalls,
like circles of raw liver, embedded in the darker matt brown of the moustachial mask.
The falcon rose and fell, like a black billhook in splinters of white wood.
a man walked along the sea-wall, flapping with maps. Five thousand dunlin flew low inland, twenty
A frieze of curlew stood along the skyline,
like a full-fed pike between reeds.
Hawks hide in dead trees. They grow out of them like branches.
The bird out of place is always the first to die. Terror seeks out the odd, and the sick, and the lost.
and volleys of arrowed starlings hissed overhead.
hawk’s kill is like the warm
embers of a dying fire.
Fear releases power.
Wisps of sunlight in a bleak of cloud,
skating up ripples, braking in a flurry of spray.
The eyes were dark, intense, baleful.
The dead bird dangled from a hawk’s-foot gallows.
The procreant spring air is soft and warm.
It is coiled like a hangman’s noose.
It is good to have trees at one’s back, to feel that everything that does not matter is on the far side of the trees.
orange-tinted wings and tail open and flash in the sun like flame-reflecting sprays of water.
integument
Their ears twitch to the volcanic growl of the thunder that is nearer now and more full-throated.
seems to rise up from the earth itself, like the snarling blast of a primitive trumpet, musty with the breath of decay.
seems to breathe through a snorkel, being itself submerged, far down below the surface of the day.
There is a displacement of air among the shadows, an adumbration of wings.
beautiful monotony of sound floating to silence on the marisma of the bluebells.
