Listening and watching

On days like this the gulls come reeling up the valley, as the rain pours down, and sheets of water cover the hills, the river nearly filled to overflowing. The water is brown and swirling, filled with sediment and other impediments like branches and nature's bric-a-brac. The gulls' calls are reporting a storm at sea, and their forlorn and salt-laden cries are carried away on the wind. The looping forms bring The Love Artist back to mind again ...

Sea birds are swooping and shrieking overhead – one, it seems, in particular. He glances up: its wings came close that time, and he does not like the look of its beak. It soars off into the sky, and he shields his eyes and follows. Far now, just a speck, it swings in great looping circles, drawing O’s and O’s against the blue. On and on they go, those circles, graceful and languorous…
Suddenly, with an irrepressible surge of ego, of desire, of wild awful need, Ovid believes the O is for him. Immaculate, principal, ovate letter! Yes, it is – it is a sign – showing that he shall be fixed in the sky as he so awfully longs to be: borne aloft, transfigured, forever.

Language in the landscape, Rudyard Kilping, Just So. Imagining the W ... “a little bit of the winding Wagai River for the nice windy-windy wa-sound”...

And then the smell of firewood, newly cut, sappy, and the smoke from the chainsaw hanging for a moment in the rain-soaked air. Helen Keller, “The other day I went to walk toward a familiar wood. Suddenly a disturbing odour made me pause in dismay. Then followed a peculiar measured jar, followed by dull, heavy thunder. I understood the odor and the jar only too well. The trees were being cut down.”

A grey day, but one inhabited by presences, words woven into world ...

Words for Mid-Winter, June 2008, JB