04 12 07

My news for you
the stag roars
winter snow
summer is gone

wind high and cold
the sun low
quick its course
sea running strong

deep-red the bracken
its shape lost
everywhere the cry
of the wild goose

frost has hold
of the wings of birds
season of ice
these are my tidings

Something catches my attention this evening. The wind backs up & blusters somewhere else for the first time in three days. My ears ring in the absence of fast moving air; it’s like a reversing truck, how I imagine tinnitus to be. As my ears adjust & begin to stretch my hearing for something else – a curlew maybe; perhaps the hiss of tide retreating - the wind & rain return.

If the anonymous poet of the Scel lem duib, (the poem here translated from the Irish with spare elegance by Geoffrey Squires) were to visit Ardnamurchan today & sit here, back to an oak tree in a hollow, watching the tide in the bay, he’d find the land unchanged. Although the stags have now stopped their roar, rutting over, the wind is high & strong & the wild goose frets across the moss. The word scel is usually translated as poem or song. Geoffrey Squires, with more than elegance, has the right of it by using the English tidings, & news. It’s truly news; a report as fresh this evening as when the poet was first chilled by that wind 1200 years ago at the end of summer.

Even in my waterproof fleece-lined German ex-army trousers (swords to ploughshares, or at any rate breeches) the cold strikes home & I move across the hill into the wind & back to the byre, where the spider is sheltering from the weather.

I’d thought her at first to be a house spider, Tegenaria saeva or domestica. She’s certainly the right size – approaching an inch from eyes to spinner, excluding legs - & moves fast enough; though with a strange patience, if it’s that, she’ll keep still while I bring the lens to bear on her abdomen & dramatic pedicel. We’ve been moving around each other from room to room since the southwesterlies first arrived, & by now I’m convinced she’s not a house spider, but like any other creature this past week is avoiding rain & the wind that blows rain into cracks & fissures. She has no web that I can find, no cocoon shaped web-dwelling from which to run at prey. Her abdomen is black, as is her carapace, but she lacks any abdominal markings that I can see. I leave her be, both of us in the dry, unfurling bracken days a memory. When I’ve towelled off, she’s nowhere in sight.