17 11 07

sleet or snow?
feels good it soaks into.
my body wet.
mistily moistened.
snow or cold rain?
acanthus rooting above me gone bad for the cold?
or those withered leaves suffering heavy snow?
what’s that faint sound coming on?
a jet?

I find it hard to observe frogs closely without being distracted by fragments of Kusano Shimpei’s poems. That one is from monologue of a hibernating frog (translated from the Japanese by Cid Corman with Susumu Kamaike) & it’s what frogs should be doing round about now, not leppin across roads in front of cars & pickups & heavy boots. But there they are. Making sure they don’t dry out; though in Sunart oakwoods, it’s just about impossible to dry out. There’s no doubt though that the year is somewhat warmer for longer than is usual. Over on the north shore of Loch Sunart, close by the wrecks of two small boats, ragged robin, Lychnis flos-cuculi, is still in flower. Here at Gobsheallach, right outside the door are the tall purple flowers & foliage of spear thistle, Cirsium vulgare; up the hill, as elsewhere around, male catkins of hazel share a branchlet with as yet unshed & now lime green autumn leaves. I mention this in the bliss of ignorance. The thistle & ragged robin are summer flowering, yet here we are in mid November. How easy to use phrases like global warming; the truth is, there are complex factors at work here, which such easiness undermines. It’s certainly the case that plants have a wider period of flowering than memory or text books generally allow. Frogs make up their own minds, according to temperature. & Kusano. & here we are in a temperate zone (& therefore basically not too extreme), in what amounts to a rainforest, made so partly by the north Atlantic drift. Frogs may come & go as they please, to a certain extent, using the glucose in their blood as a kind of anti-freeze; though I grant, not of their own volition. When they do hibernate, it’s in a hibernaculum. What a grand word for sleeping in mud.
But neither the frogs nor myself are sleeping the winter away yet. There’s a half-moon, lying on its back among broken clouds, the way I feel to be, looking up at the few visible stars, but no sign of the Leonid meteors, which are only for three days from the 16th to the 18th of this month; nor of the shooting stars that my star chart predicts. Peter tells me also that I might be able to see the comet Holmes, in Perseus, not too far (though that has to be relative) from Andromeda.
I see only the frogs tonight

proceeding quietly single file.
long silent single file.
file of frogs proceeding.

from Lululu’s funeral (accompanied by Chopin’s funeral march) Kusano Shimpei.