28 11 07

I seem to inhabit time backwards these quick days; a regression into memory. As a child, I heard of Eskimoes having hundreds of words for snow. Now I know that Franz Boas the anthropologist recorded just four: to mean lying snow, falling snow, drifting snow & snow drift. This, in just one language of the many of the people I now know as Inuit. Maybe there are many more Boas was not told. Here, there’s rain. It’s falling straight down & is constant. This morning’s Shipping Forecast gave six options for rain around the country: occasional rain, rain then showers, rain or showers, continuous moderate rain, slight drizzle & rain, & finally, occasional rain or drizzle. Before going out, I try to decide which I’m seeing through the kitchen window. It must be continuous moderate rain. Fliuch; wet then, in Gaelic. There’s no wind. Our words in English for rain – drizzle, showers, heavy rain, squalls, pour into my mind as the moderate rain falls on my green knitted hat.

One of this year’s piebald lambs – a cross of a blackface tup with a Hebridean ewe – with one and a half thin horns, nuzzles the hens where they disconsolately scratch the sogged turf. Up the hill water abandons its usual courses across & through thin soil, & being pragmatic, takes to the roads to follow its way to the bay. Which might be fresh rather than salt in all this rain. Fresh now, as though it’s the first time I’ve seen this (though in truth it’s an abiding memory from I don’t know when), on every hard rush blade, at the junction of each now-dead flowerhead & stem, drops of water catch my eye, rinse my sight.

At the point that looks out to the Atlantic, the morning’s heron voices her displeasure at my appearance & cracks long wings over to the island, to the looping, lingering call of her always companion, the curlew.

As the short day eases into dusk, the rain clears & a dilute sun sets a little west of the Tor of Beeches, its off-vermilion blush momentarily lending the hills a purple light among clinging clouds; as though the heather was again flowering as it did in summer. As the small stems of stork’s bill, Erodium cicutarium, flower unseen & unseasonal, by the sea’s edge right here, right now.

24 11 07

By Castle Tioram the fat handfed black pheasants are strident in their protest at the mere sight of the hound & myself. The dithering birds chak-chak at the hound, who, since they’re behind a wire fence, affects not to notice them.

A red squirrel climbs the Scots pine anti-clockwise, finding tiny things of interest there; its incurved tail meagre & rufous. It cares as little for all of us as the hound for the pheasants, as I do for the man who pays the breeder of the birds, reared only to be killed; food a long way from consideration.

The hound makes a hiccupping sally towards a rabbit on the island the castle sits on.

A herring gull mourns overhead.

23 11 07

At sunrise, together with a hind limned against a lightening sky, I watch as the bay becomes gold across its newborn sand. The news bulletin told me of Palestinians waking to the bulldozing of precious & ancient olive trees uprooted to make way for the concrete wall. The sun gilding sand is heart stopping, an organ played on by the blood of hind & human.

The hind moves on delicate black hooves over rock & heather, downhill, elegantly scratching her ear with her right rear leg; maybe, now in calf, she’s in as contemplative a mood as myself. I move up hill in a sky rapidly silvering then greying as the sun rises above the bay, above Ben Resipole’s hip & above rain clouds moving in from the Atlantic. The birches & the moss below are full of the flit & dart of chaffinches. The males echo the day, with their blue-grey crowns & rosy breasts, with the upcoming generation, or so I take it to be, slightly less coloured, but they’ll grow into it. The female is altogether olive brown. A grey crow, one of a pair in an alder, is wiping his beak on a branch, with a knife-sharpening motion, to take off traces of breakfast.

Under alder & birch & oak alike, the skeletal remains of bracken keel & reveal the green vividness of sphagnums & the herringbone pattern & green corduroy of shield ferns, (Polystichum aculeatum is my stab in the darkness of my own uncertainty). In the oaks grow polypody – Polypodium interjectum, their green multiple tongues dripping & refreshingly free of cant.

Dusk comes a little earlier each night, bringing greater safety, but greater hunger to the deer. The Glen Tarbert stags are down from the tops; three of them that I see have almost identical broken left antlers. They’re young & their rivalries are over, leaving only those cracked anti-trophies of male hormone flow, subsided as tide in the inlets. At Camas a’ Choirce, a solitary fossicking badger trots & snuffles between pounding rain squalls, light on her feet, her belly low-slung & her body-mass-index enough to frighten humans. Mostly nocturnal, she (I have no way of telling the sex of this animal) will spend more time sleeping in the longer colder nights, but have no food shortages just yet; the woods an autumn larder of roots, worms, carrion & mushrooms. At Kentra, young hind calves trot ahead of me, bemused by my torchlight in the pre-moon dark.

Clarity arrives with the full moon. Although there are clouds, the light is brilliant, lighting the white of sheep up on Gobsheallach hillside with a shining matched only by the luminescence of lichen rings on the rocks I finger as personal touchstones as I pass. Scale is confused in such clarity where I find it hard to ascribe anything but equal value to what is in front of my eyes wherever my glance falls – a lunar illumination scaled to fit human perception.

20 11 07

There is a second flush of growth in oak & other trees, known as lammas growth. It happens in the summer & is a response to temperature & other factors favourable to a fresh surge of growth. The tree is most prone to this when it’s young; it doesn’t happen in old trees. Nicolas Battey, writing in the Journal of Experimental Botany: “This decline could be conceived as learning from experience . . . A youthful tree shows lammas growth. It seems an enthusiasm, an impetuous response to summer warmth and light. With age, it declines, and the tree settles down to more sedate growth.” It’s a kind of freedom of expressive growth; it’s not the expansion of spring laid down the previous year. I don’t doubt that trees also learn from experience; to see any tree in Sunart oakwoods reacting, however slowly, to prevailing wind & the falling of old limbs from gales & lightning is to see trees balancing on rocky slopes in a decades long dance.

Lammas Day (“so call’d from the Mass said for preservation of Lambs”) is perhaps a Christian pilfering of Lughnasadh, the festival to celebrate the start of the harvest season, the growth that has given the first fruit.

It may be there is a correlative to trees’ lammas growth in the ragged robin & the spear thistle; a learning & an urge to make a fresh spurt, an utterance of life. An impetuous response. A song.

Also with a new burst of expansion are the jet planes, which have not yet made their eastward migration, but were only waiting on fine weather to make their high-sky vapour hieroglyphs, which fade to parentheses & the symbol for eternity; a figure eight on its side. These offensive jets (I’m using the MoD term) are Harriers & Tornadoes. Somewhere between the swept back wings of Tornadoes are Storm Shadow & Brimstone missiles, as well as General Purpose Bombs & Cluster Bombs which sow their submunitions over a couple of acres to flower at will. In other fields. Some of these aircraft rip to Ardnamurchan from Lossiemouth, about 150 miles as the crow flies. The vapour symbols are probably scrawled by a defensive Typhoon; the Eurofighter.

Among the boats returning to land fish today are: New Dawn, Celestial Dawn, Fruitful Vine, Fruitful Harvest, Harvest Hope & Ocean Harvest.

19 11 07

I can feel the frost coming. The air is cold & still. Chimney smoke over by Kentra, not moved by any wind, drops to the bracken & rolls, spreading like liquid. The sky has cleared itself of sulky grey & the moon has already risen high. There are two sunsets this evening. One, the colour of an angry boil against a few delicate stratus clouds slips behind Torr Beithe, the tor of beeches, now conifers. The other, the colour of salmon flesh is hard against me in the sea by Eilean Dubh. A curlew’s thin thread of a call as she rises stitches the two.

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With the moon nearly full, the shadow of the two rowans just by here & my own shadow as I pass by them are as distinct as any negative formed by the sun. There are no Leonids, comets or shooting stars; the moon is enough, picking out the shine of rock. This moon is the Blood Moon, it’s written on my almanac, with vague neopagan overtones.

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.

15 11 07

swords into ploughshares

a gunmetal sea

& when I write grey skies I think of Gertrude Stein. These are not grey skies but curling greyladen clouds, formless in whisps & solids, changing their formlessness as wind drives them. Light & dark according to density, the load of moisture they hold, that they are. Nothing recognisable, as different from yesterday’s grey sky as the shapes clouds don’t become. No trees, faces, monsters. They’re all down here, where here is. All morning behind that grey a reverberance above cloud tops; another unseen jet rolling over the sky, rumbling the hills here. I’d thought the manoeuvres & ravening aerobatic displays over, that air force jets had ended, another seasonal event, going into underground hangars like the woodants, to sleep & dream of becoming. But this is probably a last summer visitor who can’t wait to catch his fellows in their fall migration to the middle east, the mountains of Afghanistan & plains of Iraq