Knots

LEXICON

For centuries she has accompanied these trees, and their ancestors, since the ground was just a quiet forest clearing by a brook, then a farm, then a churchyard. As the city grew around her, almost everything changed, but somehow this ancient spirit of the wildwood is still here, minding her saplings, watching from her council flat, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, and cataloguing the strange human world she inhabits, searching for patterns of meaning and the key to her liberation.

germ: Small beyond small, tiny twinkling thing, full of being and dreaming, like all life reaching out with grasping fingers, tendrils, searching stems, always facing the unknown, always turning towards the light.; misty friday, april, lamplight on paving stones

offering: People used to bring me gifts. Only humble things. A bunch of daisies here, a pillow of moss, twigs tied into a frame, honey fungus filled with spores, all offered with supplications of longing and nerve, laid on tree roots or dry leaves or a patch of grass, always within earshot of a rushing watercourse and a thin breeze in the branches, and not to mention the discounts and loans without recourse or consequence, chocolate tins piled on pallets and aisles filled with shifting assortments of scented candles, wrapping papers, plastic trees on metal armatures, spirit gums shrunk in cellophane, glittering boxes in primary colours.; snow falling on palm sunday
interest: A kind of commitment without materiality, which adds itself to itself as the days go on. When you’re sitting in one of those eateries along westgate, you can read the details on the advertisements set up in the windows of the insurance vendor, while surrounded by the odours of sausage meat and grease, where the regular girl notes down orders with that manner of hers. I always have the same thing anyway, eggs and brown sauce, then a cigarette or two afterwards, waiting at the bus stop. If it comes too soon you can just get the next one or walk home along the passageway with the beech hedge on one side. You would think she should know by now and she never looks you in the eyes, always just past you, like there’s someone staring over your shoulder and the jewellery, the adornments she carries on her neck and face, always so bright and cold.; a brick wall warmed in the sun and hot to the hand
fallout: Something that still happens every now and again, in which the consequences of certain actions become unavoidable. Sometimes it’s an encumbrance you can’t shed, clinging like old bark. Recently I’ve had a feeling like that, the weight of watching upon you as you thread your way through the city. However many turns you take and doubles through the docks and back, you can’t shrug it off. There’s this sense just lately that things are no longer certain in the way that they once were. The east wind is blowing, and everyone knows the east wind brings changes, and other, sorrowful things.; moss growing on the church tower in westgate

The birch is the oldest and first to return to the land as the ice sheets fall back, its seeds carried on streams of meltwater. Hunters and shamans stride the landscape, in search of aurochs and deer and hidden wisdom.

saline: Its faint taste on the air when you’re in the docks, even though it’s river water here, but it’s not sweet. It carries the remembrance of old vortigern, he of the long hair and the way he used to look at you like he could nearly understand what you were saying, but not quite. Was it vortigern? His father? One or the other, or both. They stood here in the loading bays, supervising the arrivals of expensive fruits, barrels of wine and preserved fish, and every manner of spice, looking so pleased with themselves, even with the mercenaries on their way over the hills and down the valleys, even with the marcher lords dissembling and prevaricating, even with their alliances failing and all their grand schemes of taxation turning to dust.; rain on the churchyard, rain on the glasshouse, rain from the distant seas
borders: The bright fort circled with them. The flat blocks formed of them. The robbed out, beaten down, buried remains of them, just below the surface. They rise and fall, these walls, thicken and wane, now blocking your routes from greyfriars to the east gate, now guiding you into the marketplaces, the retail plazas, the multistorey car parks, marking the perimeters of the priories and burial grounds, their stones holding the memory of ancient volcanoes, and circuits of regolith and moraine. Stones and boundaries go together, always carved with inscriptions and initials and bearing records of love bonds and the imprint of the weather, the shape of my own body as I sit there day after day in the quiet, watching sparrows drift through the ash trees and sometimes butterflies on the shrubs. The headstones in the churchyard are sentries around me, bricks in the wall at the end of time.; the milestone now replaced with a municipal box, dark green and dusty
quantum: Thing like lamplight in the shadows or salmon in deep water. A mercurial disposition, the vital resins in your veins and certain orders of honeydews. The distant ringing of bells on sunday evenings, carried on the breeze in a copse of white-bark birches, the endless flow of speech from flat screens and public address systems forming a swift, slippery medium of hormones and invective all over the city streets, leaking out of pubs and bars. I walk among the citizens of this place though I’m not one of them. I’m a different sort, but I watch and I listen to their fights and squabbles, compliments, repetitions, lies. A couple’s promises on the night of a fire. The bickering of men on the side of the main road, car doors flung open to the rain. Centurions consigning their curses to the earth. All the words I’ve witnessed. Some I remember, most I choose to forget.; mayday and the running of hares in the thicket
probability: In terms of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, a means of limiting one’s expectations and a natural restraint on aspiration. When I get back to the flat most afternoons, a troupe of magpies jostle impatiently on the balcony handrail, waiting for me to drop a little chopped rind into their bowl. They make their calculations, monitoring my approaches through the streets and paying close attention to my routes and habits, in order to establish the point of arrival. Often they bring me stories of the things they’ve seen. Doorways left open, the appearance of felines, plastic bags snared on weathervanes, the carrion situation on the busier thoroughfares. In the autumn though, they keep their distance, preferring to dine on the small, bitter fruits of the trees and shrubs and chattering to one another in the branches as dusk falls.; wednesday morning, bells ringing for candlemass

As woods begin to thicken on hills and plains, the pines spread north and endure the more difficult conditions, providing shelter and firewood for encampments and farmsteads. Trade routes cross the valley and lead on to the sea.

trust: An established pattern relying on fragility. For example, the rent collector keeps a locked cupboard in this flat but she has opened the door only once in five years, on the day I moved in. I stole a quick glimpse. It was filled to the ceiling with shoeboxes, each wrapped stoutly in clear plastic. Her name is stanley and she speaks in riddles I might one day decode.; sparrows in the elder branches, staying and going
intoxication: Smoothly go the hops of india pale, downly go the pilsners and cervezas, sweetly go the witbiers and the trappistes. Each glass drained increases the magic out of all proportion to its volume.; smoking on the balcony, smoking in the stairwell
exclusion: A painful wound in the history of these grounds. I never left the land but the land left me, edged out by the new dimensions of stone, steel, gravel, concrete. So now, I haunt the places where hawthorns used to grow and the slopes where I once whispered to proud, steadfast oaks and swiftrising limes. So now, I nurture the nettles and thorns on the railway embankment, mollycoddle the alders and firs, rejoice in the knotweeds, dandelions, plantains.; tuesday, darkening, warm air after rain
radio: An energy folded into the air, forming part of the fabric of everyday space and intercepted in patterns. It makes you forget the old names for things, like ellern and holt, lizzen, marian, snakestone. It dreams through you and amends you, one twist at a time. There is renewed uncertainty over the diplomatic crisis, the nation paralysed by sports bulletins and call shows, innumerable fragments of war, flood, rescue and equity release. In the evenings, looking out over the aerials and cabling, bleak twigs sprouting from the ears of the buildings all around, I hear things in the dissonance of reports and soundbites, and strains of violins and violence. The people in the upstairs flat surround themselves with these voices all through the night but the words go unheard as they sleep, discharging into the dark.; the black rats diving between abandoned cartwheels

Clearings are made between the hazels, grasslands are grazed by domesticated cattle. As more species arrive, trees spread over the slopes and downs, their branches filling with ants, beetles, sparrows, mosquitoes.

plasticity: Various forms of closure in the supermarkets and record shops, stuck in hedges and twigs and liable to change or recombination. In the convenience store, the man plucks a bright blue bag from a clip, bellows it open, passes it over my packets of bacon and cheese. He must enclose them in a double membrane, before I am allowed to take them home and break them free again. Sometimes I just stare at the tomatoes, arranged like glassy jewels in the refrigerator.; ice on the surface of the millpond
branding: Some things you can’t shed. You carry the marks of how you’re regarded and the faultlines you’ve walked along, finding yourself always on the fissure between two kingdoms, forest and town, wessex and mercia, church and state. I remember one night when the smoke on the air was thicker than usual, covering the stars, and there were the sounds of voices raised between the buildings, I went outside and saw flames leap across the streets all along westgate. I helped the women drag their furniture and children out of doors and we all joined together to form piles of barrels and sacks, hand looms and spinning wheels in every courtyard and square. I went with them for shelter to old trinity chapel, lay next to them on the cold stones, heard their prayers for rain.; monday morning, high summer, among the gravestones and their blue shadows
proactivity: The way the mistlethrush patrols the fence on the recreation ground, seeking out snails, her eyes like little stoppers. Ask me the locations of all her nests, the names of her mates and hatchlings, the depths of her bafflements and how quickly they melt in a column of sunlight. Look how she’s drawn to the silvery crisp packets caught in the brambles and their sharp reflections. She is the queen of patience, my little stormhen, keeping low, listening out for whatever new songs might be going, taking what she can get as she draws her living out of the margins. Dawncot, shifflewing, jack-o-bottle, skyflare.; a cloud bank crossing the horizon on saint swithin’s day
freight: This is the way it comes up river, past the naight, onto the quayside. Barrels of meat, sacks of flour, pallets of silverware, electrical goods, the vessels returning with bolts of cloth, their holds packed with wool and aggregate, back along the new canal, down into the estuary, while their deliveries are wheeled and carried through the streets to the market cross. All those afternoons up there, among the sorry young souls in the pillories and girls bemoaning the price of cocket, stalls of soapsmiths and parchment makers, plumbers and potters, and then all souls back to the ram inn for wine and porter. I couldn’t leave this place if I wanted to. I’m hedgebound. My roots are stuck in the earth where I first sprouted. I can travel in time but not in space. Up and down the ages, I navigate these paths alone.; the calends of may and the north wind still strong

Amid the new hunger for resources, woodland oaks lend their heft to temples, halls, statues and ships. Half the trees, ancient, mighty, are consumed as the settlers move in.

horticulture: Where the park was on barton street, the bowling green and tea rooms, near the grounds where they used to release rock doves and shoot at them with poorly maintained carbines, you can go into the bookmakers for a plastic cup of tea from the machine and watch the screens for all the news from lingfield or newmarket. You can study the broadsheets pinned to the wall like the old days and use stubby pens to write notes to the staff, messages which are somewhat like instructions, or predictions of a very precise nature. Then you have to trudge back in the drizzle, past the kebab shops and coffee houses, laundrettes and quick marts, and all the other distractions. There are still traces of ancient beings in these places. They left their interlaced networks a few yards down into the earth, still pulsing with signals beneath a concrete lid, faint and almost forgotten.; the old holly bush uprooted by commonwealth soldiers and burned at whitefriars
optics: At night you close your eyes but you can’t sleep in this neighbourhood. Foxes stalk the estate and the westerlies rattle the sliding doors to the balcony. You get herring gulls nesting on the roof of the community office and drug sellers driving slowly through the square, the couple yelling in the ground floor apartment with their romanian friends, always with their windows open and a variable assembly of cardboard by the front door. At some point you notice the patterns thrown by headlamps of the traffic on the causeway and you wonder how there can be so many vehicles at this hour, and where they’re all heading, and the cargoes they carry.; bonfire night, heavy rain
hydraulics: Pressure can sometimes exist in liquid form, in a way that tends towards you unexpectedly. Sometimes you get a sense of this from the news programmes, how the various rebellions are faring, which political speeches have been completed, when there are changes in market conditions, where the lost treasures have been discovered. It’s somewhere in the stories about bodies lying in woodland and watercourses and the repeated recalibrations of global temperature and waveforms. You can hear it in the heating ducts and water pipes as fluids are circulated and materials expand and contract. They’re uncanny, these sounds that flood the senses and dampen the reactions. Few can resist them.; confetti trodden into the road outside the library
pentatonics: Human beings have a great capacity for rearrangement. They’ll classify all substances and segment them into categories, even those things which could never be determined. Especially those things.; scaffolders scaling the southern face, shouting to one another, singing

In roman schemes, the quickgrowing alders are chosen for the plantations which fuel the expansion of the empire, feed its hypercausts and build its cities and aqueducts.

nuclear: The preoccupation with energy is a recent development, commonly enacted in hazy sections of landscape, but the reactors downriver have been powered down and the complex is busy with attendants and operatives, dismantling frameworks, demolishing turbine halls, filling in cooling ponds. That boy from the plant, I remember his eyes but not his name, perhaps I never knew it, and the way we rescued one another from some function in the guildhall and walked into the night, and the things he told me about minerals and containment and the discovery of light, and the secrets I shared in return.; the chandlers on saint john’s lane all emptied and boarded up
dynamics: Units of change can be long or short, with or without attachments, but invariably too fast. When you’ve lived for a thousand years or more, clouds flip in and out of formation, the days spin over, stars blink on and off. Towers of scaffolding construct and dismantle, structures form, roads and rivers shift, electrical circuits fill with bits, objects pop out of the air. Beneath it all is a current, a pulse, a blackboard filling with menus, flickering traffic lights, crowds dissolving into a blur. A tiny field mouse in her sandcoloured coat takes sunflower seeds from my hand, her heart beating six times a second.; thor’s day, solmonath, still and clear
variance: That time when the bells were drowned out by guns, and the king’s army blocked all routes into the city and bombarded the walls and rained fire down, and houses were smashed, churches in flames, and in the eastern grove, one of my precious, gracile hazels was struck. I watched her fall, watched her burn, limbs cracking and blackened. I’d known her seedform and her saplinghood. I was there for all her new spring shoots, right up to the towering reach of her, mute, impotent witness to her last transformation, her body reclaimed by the soil. Around that time, a lot of things began to change.; the river flooding and all the fields are mirrors under the sky
immersion: After a while, you start paying more attention to the neighbourhoods around you. Your gaze adjusts to a different rate of exchange and all that ephemeral commerce just snaps into focus. I began walking their streets and precincts. I joined the crowds in the courtyards, listened to the morning news, sought out drinking holes and libraries, flipped through magazines in waiting rooms and learned the names of all the roads. I followed them, haunted them, and gradually learned their ways.; all the streets filled for the pentecost fair

More of the forest is thinned into wooded pastures and limes are coppiced for fastgrowing firewood. Fruits and barks are collected for medicines and processed into infusions, adhesives, detergents.

politics: Follow me, wait, listen carefully, be yourself, man up, press here, do not remove, pull tab to open, don’t worry, eat well, wake up, sleep tight, look on the bright side, beware of the dog, break the glass, push button for assistance, act your age, have faith, mind your step, keep in lane, make a wish, run, play, pause, rewind, advertise here, hope for the best, tread carefully, live life to the full, wing it, open your eyes, buy now, pay later, skip, stay alive, hit the ground running, fire away, remove before heating, retire to a safe distance, close the door on your way out.; dawn on lammas, light rain
nutrition: Hot pies. Eat an apple. Take your vitamins. Reduce your alcohol intake. Less passion from less protein. Quit smoking. Not too much salt. Avoid sugar. Choose organic. Steer clear of processed food. Maintain a balanced diet. Exercise regularly. More fibre. Drink water. Every day, more and more, and at the same time, less and less, and many of the foods already gone. I’m thinking of black-capped mushrooms that no longer grow on the roots of yews, the woodlands empty of long-haired pigs and bitter ant honey.; hidden in the roots of an old oak, a key wrapped in cloth
programming: As in surety, as in redemption, as in the translation of the abstract to the disembodied. A subset of intricate forms which remain both functional and hidden. Over time, norms become more entrenched. It’s the invisible circuits, like perimeters of the abbey grounds, the line from quayside to war memorial, the secret paths linking the parks with the burial grounds and now even me, on an autumn morning, brewing a pot of tea in my kitchen, according to a certain regimen, with great peter ringing the hour from the high tower and the heretic bishop standing below on his little plinth, poor soul, first burned at the stake and then turned to stone, and all for complying with the wrong terms and conditions.; signwriters working in saint john’s lane
remuneration: It was during one of the civil wars, when saint mary’s became a prison. The souls they captured out on the southern fields were marched through the city and into the square and locked inside the stone walls of the church. There was something about these soldiers that brought to mind the old places. Their clothes were patterned like morning mist. Their eyes were the colour of the west wind. After dark, I brought the guards a pitcher of ale and some herbcakes and, from the transept shadows, the prisoners whispered to me in the secret language of hawthorn, sedge and leafmeal. They had made a bargain, they said, with one of the young captains, and he had not kept his side. No matter, they sighed, we will take our payment another way. In the morning, they were gone, the church doors creaking in the breeze and their gaolers slumbering like dead men.; the verger gone mad, casting coins into the river mouth

Many great elms are cleared, giving way to expanses of arable fields, leaving only a small area of forested land, many of the remaining areas reserved in the form of parks and hunting grounds.

segmentation: Even before the walls of saint mary stood here, I walked a mile with a gooseherd on the forest road. It was her job, she said, to know the names and forms of all the woodland beasts. The common basilisk, the manticore, the jackalope, where to find brownies, how to catch a unicorn. She considered the hare a species of heath demon and knew the categories of ettins, bogles and all the other giants.; three weddings and all the bells ringing
identification: Can I take your account number? I don’t know. You don’t know your account number? I know many numbers, but I’m not sure about that one. I’ll try to find you a different way, what is you name? Well, that depends. Right, okay. I have lots of names and also, at the same time, am nameless. Your family name? Treegrove. It’s not coming up. Thornthicket, wildwood. No nothing, how about your address? Hollow next the brook, the burial grounds, where the heretics were burned. I’m not finding it, have you been there for a long time? Yes, I have been there for a long time.; winter gales, windmill sails blown down
dictionaries: Collections of small machines, containing themselves in their own devices. One day, when some young men were driving their mopeds all around the walkways of the estate, I decided I would begin to write down the words of the hotbloods. I don’t know why. I’ve kept it going though, sitting in my quiet room, at my formica dining table, filling notebooks bit by bit. It has become a comfort, this act of remembrance. I’ve been among them for too long.; bins overflowing in the alleyways, spilling into the street
accounting: First out and along the path at dawn, treading quietly among the little bushes and under the shadow of my brooding guardian beech. Keep heart, old man and see your chestnut neighbours are shedding their leaves a bit later this year. They like your company. Between the saplings and through the college gate, past the new limes, still tender from last year’s pollarding, and good morning, eager, young sycamore in your sunfavoured plot, and to you, surly blackthorn, behind your high hedge. Back down the passageway towards old nick and his sentries, two hazels on one side, lonely yew behind and rounding the corner, three beech sisters, displaying their coppery garb. A little further, a pair of silver birches stuck in a roadside lawn, limbs bent down to touch the grass. Not long to wait now friends, until that long drink of winter. I feel it coming. Yes, a modest patch now, barely a dozen limes, chestnuts, fivefold beech, but think of the fortunes this bank has disbursed in its time. The tonnage of its oaks, deep pockets of bramble and nightshade, the wealth of ash and elm that once stood here, and one day will return.; the blind friar sitting all day at the market cross

Ash for arrows, yew for bowstaves, oaks for war machines and fighting ships. Weapons are wrought from the trees, until supplies begin to run short. Thieves and bandits hide in the woods.

informatics: An appreciation of minor differentials and their corresponding affordances, especially when you walk, day after day, the same small bounds. Here is where an elm once stood. Here is where a hunter carved antlers. Here is where a fire was made. Here is where the bishop was burned. Here is where the provosts watched. Here is where the substances are handed furtively from car windows. Here is where they are taken into veins. Here is where a goldsmith’s apprentice was born. Here is where he hanged himself. Here is where the apple trees were. Here is where the barrels were put. Here is where you watch the sparrows. Here is where the alehouse collapsed on good friday. Here is where lightning struck twice. Here is where the ravens meet. Here is where the loosestrife grew. Here is where the king of england’s body waited on a twowheeled cart. Here is where the river flooded, long before it changed its course, and here is where I sit down now, with a daylight moon and the clouds running over, and a blackbird singing a funeral song.; soldiers encamped in the cathedral grounds
geologies: Assortments of concealed volumes, powerful and remote, recalling the days when silence was uprooted and the disturbance became louder and impossible to avoid. The first day, they came with fire, the second with flint tools. On the third, they carried sharptooth saws. Machinery came on the fourth day, snapping hundredyear boughs like they were sticks and leaving deep welts in the earth. For time without measure, there was nothing down here but roots and filaments, ant colonies and wormburrows. The land held the warmth of summer sun and the river’s overflow. They refashioned it. They filled it. They made it a repository for their own formations. Bones, brains, coins, organs, clay gods, silver rings, folded parchments, bits of cloth, fragments of glass, inscribed tablets, sealed tins, foundation stones, lead culverts, brick sewers, alloy ducts, concrete pipes, plastic tubes, a compound artery of insulated cables, thickening every month. The river used to run here, just behind a stand of willows, before it twisted again and slipped over the bank, but if you stand quietly with your bare feet in contact with the ground, you can still feel it tremble.; a rabbit, wounded, shivering in the nettles
perpetuity: Nothing is fixed. If you wait long enough, these streetlamps will flicker out. The roads will empty, the pavements too. A silence will fall on the airwaves. The buildings will reorganise into quantities of dust. Beetles come to gnaw on timbers and draw them back into the soil. Rain pours on the windows of the vegan cafe and down into the gutters and, where the water mixes with engine oil, there are rainbows.; christmas morning, icy and quiet
eschatologies: Sorry, we are closed today due to sickness, refurbishment, imperial orders, the royal wedding, water ingress, a general feeling of hopelessness, extreme weather, political conditions, technical difficulties, plagues, locusts, the ice age, civil war, volatility in the markets, unexploded bombs, an electrical fault, unforseen circumstances, sudden changes in the price of oil, climate change, plumbing issues, the rise of the machines, a sense of impending doom, the heat death of the universe.; the vicarage wall fallen down and blocking the traffic

Armies range across the country, setting hollies and chestnuts ablaze. Cartloads of firewood are transported into city squares for the burning of witches and heretics.

crossword: One across, having the qualities of goose feathers. Two down, the hidden web which binds all beings. Seven down, black plastic litter bins overflowing by the council offices. Nine across, skaters with cider bottles in the friary ruins. Twelve down, barge stuffed with flowerpots on the quayside moorings. Seventeen across, scaffolders in the early morning, bellowing to one another as they scale the southern side of the flats. Nineteen down, a gold ring dropped by a moorish poet, emerging in the teeth of a jcb.; sunday teatime, pigeons
taxation: The oldest forms of writing were invented to record fiscal liabilities. Wars were fought over them, governments faltered. A horseman made a fire here, right where that sycamore stands. He roasted rabbit meat in the evening and told me what it was like to fight the infidels. He described the colours of desert lands and said he had once visited avalon. At least, he believed it to be the magic isle at the time. In hindsight, he said, it might have been swindon.; a swarm of bees on the keeper’s house, the day of his death
logistics: Boats have come by here, swift canoes going with the current, barges loaded with coal and grain. Stone blocks from newport were brought this way on special rafts, timber from the north, fish from the western sea, wool from the eastern hills. As far as the humans are concerned, everything starts out in the wrong place.; gas lights fitted on eastgate
biochemistry: Remember that little apothecary shop at the end of grace lane, its shutters opened to the street and inside, arranged behind the counter, a row of glass jars with all the categories of the earth. Turmeric, paprika, bay leaves, wormwood, heads of marigold, witchazel, dried worms, spanish juice, nutmegs, mace oil, chunks of ginger, saffron petals, fenugreek seeds. They had white lead, resin globes, aloe powder, arsenic, narwhal tusk, mastic and antimony. Bezoar stones, hart horn and a small, very pricey bottle of quicksilver.; dark evening, cold and still

The skies fill with smoke from factories and mills. Charcoal burners construct mud ovens between the trees, watching their low flames burning beech staves through the night.

volatility: In the shopping centre, I once saw faye from the betting shop place her plastic bags carefully on the ground in order to slap her boyfriend’s face. If there weren’t so many people around, he would have hit her back, harder, but instead he shouted a curse old as language and walked away. Although he never told her, he liked her more when she was angry.; advertising hoardings put up on westgate
migration: Did you hear the one about the barkeeper at the three cocks who dreamed of adventure and signed up for the wars? He boarded a train with a kitbag and khakis and disappeared over the morning hills. There was a telegram or two over the years. Reports of the sky thick with arrows at the siege of harfleur, an ambush in the hills above jerusalem, artillery bombardments on muddy fields, firefights on the plains of afghanistan, and then it all went quiet, until he came back one day with a sergeant’s stripes and a certain displacement, a man who had travelled too far and seen too much.; children playing on the bomb site
disconnection: It’s hopeless on a sunday, said the man who used to live in the house with herbs in window boxes. He was thumbing the corner of his buspass and squinting at the timetables. If I don’t get the tenthirty, he said, I’m going to miss the tewkesbury bus. They need to get it organised, he said. I nodded and looked at two pigeons, flapping their wings furiously and rising on the breeze. There are falcons nesting in the bell tower again, I said, and the saplings by the river have been destroyed. Maybe I can get the train to ashchurch, he said. I can walk from there. They used to think house martins spent the winter hibernating in the mud at the bottom of ponds. Now they say they fly all the way to africa, but they don’t know exactly where.; bells ringing for trinity sunday
notifications: You can see the tower of the abbey from the balcony. It’s only just visible through the fog. A bell in that tower has been heard in these streets for six hundred years. We regret to inform you, it reports, that the lancastrian army is approaching. Royalist sympathisers have surrounded the city. The queen is dead. Bombing raids are coming soon. An armistice has been signed. The duke has married. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.; rain brought in on the west wind

Bombers cross in front of the clouds and send incendiaries screaming to the ground. Pollen grains drift through the matrix of the forest, the maples shed their bloodred leaves.

pandemonium: The swifts always come back to these streets at the start of may, when the weddings are starting up and the queue at the cathedral gets longer. They want to know the latest news as they tear over the rooftops and circle round the television antennae. What happened to the old man, they demand to know, the one with the silly red hat? When will the scaffolding come down? Why are the craneflies so spindly this year? They carve up the air with their sickle wings and summer comes on with a rush. It gets difficult to press through the bodies on westgate. The coffee shops spill out onto the pavements.; plastic bottles floating in the brook
liability: I rarely meet other ones like me. We don’t mix. We like to keep to our own patch. There’s meg lockhurdle over the river, who mostly hides in the gorse bushes and scowls at passersby. A willowkeeper in the south sends finches over the fields sometimes, with news of hedge cuttings and crop plantings, though I seldom respond. Most of the others I’ve forgotten over the years, as the land has been covered with tarmacadam coatings and the trees bounded by composite bollards. The reason I’m still here? I’m not quite ready to leave that glorious yew to her own devices. I still like the way my beeches sigh in the wind, and my notebooks are not yet filled.; suddenly all the bluebells in flower
minimalism: A special quality of surrender and negation, in which forms and patterns become disaggregated and fall away. The bath of my flat is half filled with beech leaves and half with chestnuts. Sycamore seeds collect in the kitchen cabinets. The bedrooms house a quantity of pine cones and some dried yew berries. The coat cupboard is reserved for hawthorn twigs. The problem with possessing empty volumes is the opportunities they contain and their tendency to break your connections to the past. Therefore the sparrows bickering on the telephone cables. Therefore the foxcubs crossing the church carpark. Therefore the dandelion seeds rising between buildings. Therefore the twisted trunk of a beech by the garden walls. All of them inscribed with the memory of a previous system.; the old heron watching from the riverbank
countdown: A short catalogue of diminishing returns, though time is a relative concept which varies with your perspective. Time is limited, now the fragments of a motorcycle are abandoned under the yew bushes. Time is short, with the shops closed up and shuttered. Time is running out, with nettles opening cracks in the pavement and breaking through the road surface. The time is right, as poplars take root in the the car park and crack the windows of empty vehicles. The time has come, with the side of the apartment block collapsing as its concrete fails. Time’s up, now the streetlamps are leaning on the buildings. Time passes, through silent streets.; first gales of autumn

Slowly, trees begin to repopulate the city streets, sycamore and hornbeam squeezing between concrete and glass, overflowing from gaps in the tarmac. Lichens colonise paving slabs and cement walls.

archive: The first histories were written in the strata of the earth. A chapter on invertebrates was recorded in seams of chalk and limestone. Ancient plantations were inscribed in pockets of coal. The birth of a wasp was captured in tree sap, the dimensions of a sea creature printed in calcite.; coffee house, midmorning
calibration: Minor adjustments in the mapping between internal and external, how when I think again, that cinema attendant who buried a necklace in the churchyard might actually have been the red-haired monk from the abbey, or the hunter who carved antlers next to the campfire, or the limping fusilier who snapped a young ash branch, or the hungry legionary who picked the wrong mushroom. They lived all those years apart, yet shared the same face. Everything merges now. It flickers and blurs, the images inconstant and unclear.; suddenly quiet, just before nightfall

Knots
Published 2024

Words and pictures
David Guest

dryad n, a nature spirit
inhabiting and guarding trees