29 09 07
It’s also hard for me to walk about here & return with nothing in my pockets. It’s frequently a leaf or a blossom for a jug or jar on the table. There are so many shades of green. Today it’s three little red apples & a conker. The conker is small & is probably one overlooked by everyone else; not that many children pass this way. Adults don’t bother. Conkers have the rich sheen of polished furniture. They glow in the afternoon sun. They’re wealth with no work on my part. & I’m always reminded of Basho giving the horse chestnuts of Kiso as presents to city folk. Sometimes this comes out in translation as acorns. It’s the present of that autumnal wealth that’s important, not the form it takes. Basho is saying, with his simple gift, the very obvious: here’s true riches. The apples are tiny – from wilding trees, small, spherical & deep red. What promise; of course as bitter as sloes. But in cooking, they’ll be transformed. What delights of apple jelly they’ll make, together with the long greeny-yellow apples whose pronounced separate base, a swelling upwards, is like cumulus gathering. Those came last week, stuffed in my pockets from the tree no-one bothers about on the road to Ariundle. How can I pass over the fruits of trees’ labour? They shine three times. Once in the finding, once in the cooking & at last, in the greedy devouring & savouring.
Pome: the characteristic fruit of the apple family, as an apple, pear, or quince, in which the edible flesh arises from the greatly swollen receptacle and not from the carpels.
It’s also hard for me to walk about here & return with nothing in my pockets. It’s frequently a leaf or a blossom for a jug or jar on the table. There are so many shades of green. Today it’s three little red apples & a conker. The conker is small & is probably one overlooked by everyone else; not that many children pass this way. Adults don’t bother. Conkers have the rich sheen of polished furniture. They glow in the afternoon sun. They’re wealth with no work on my part. & I’m always reminded of Basho giving the horse chestnuts of Kiso as presents to city folk. Sometimes this comes out in translation as acorns. It’s the present of that autumnal wealth that’s important, not the form it takes. Basho is saying, with his simple gift, the very obvious: here’s true riches. The apples are tiny – from wilding trees, small, spherical & deep red. What promise; of course as bitter as sloes. But in cooking, they’ll be transformed. What delights of apple jelly they’ll make, together with the long greeny-yellow apples whose pronounced separate base, a swelling upwards, is like cumulus gathering. Those came last week, stuffed in my pockets from the tree no-one bothers about on the road to Ariundle. How can I pass over the fruits of trees’ labour? They shine three times. Once in the finding, once in the cooking & at last, in the greedy devouring & savouring.
Pome: the characteristic fruit of the apple family, as an apple, pear, or quince, in which the edible flesh arises from the greatly swollen receptacle and not from the carpels.
How many years since I first read Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach? I take it from the shelf & read from A Memory Of The Players In A Mirror At Midnight, written in Zurich in 1917:
Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears.
Pluck and devour!
27 09 07
It’s harder than that. I said I’d go to the woods. Send words back. Maybe one at a time. & then the meter reader comes & he’s too short. Oak. There’s one word. It’s a hard word. The words are metered too. Maybe I should spit them out fast: oak, alder, aspen, birch, holly. No elder yet. Maybe that’s what’s holding me back. No elders. We must invent it all for ourselves, just as they told us. Is it the poplars trembling in the wind or the rain hissing on the sea at Ardtoe? Pine. I can’t read all the leaves of this wooden book. & instead I must add to them. How fortunate to be born human & see the leaves turn from those green shades to yellows & reds & all on the same pillar. & to smell the moulded centuries underfoot, cladding the jutting bedrock.
& a friend calls so we talk of apple trees instead.
26 09 07
It’s just after the equinox. Tonight it’s full moon – the harvest moon. This moon rises due east & sets due west. The length of a day is equal to the length of a night, but night, a cockstep at a time, is catching me unawares each twilight. There’s a threshold here. From here I can stare into winter. It makes me edgy seeing the blackness in this morning’s brilliant sun, reflected in the little pools of last night’s rain left among rushes. Today’s tides will be high & already the bay is preparing itself, with a calmness in the dazzle of sun, for the tons of water which will later pour in to cover its cold sands. The clouds are piled high to the south. Bare rock outcrops on the slopes glimmer, blink back in an unaccustomed brightness. Peat hags hold their water like the toothless crones they are, only tufts of bog cotton above on skinny stems. Pismires are slow today, stunned by the cold westerly. Ben Resipole’s eastern flank hunkers in shadows. The last bee is at the last scabious flower.
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