Take this manky ditch off the Yare,
this heat-stink of algae blooming –
what with all the ploughing to the margins,
abstraction of water, and run-off
into the marshes, there’s such choked chances.
But in and about this scrutty reed,
here at least, a rhizal stand of yellow flag again.
Broadsword stems, forged from the sunk under
blades that splay to these blazing iris tongues,
each with the little zag of their nectar guide.
What’s to be done but keep going?
The world is in such increments.
With so much more and more at stake,
I tell you now, for what it’s worth,
here’s where I hilt my every word.
*
Nest Surveying I, 17/4/17
TL 86843 80674
Note it all down. Shadwell Track, bottom wood;
this is concerned with time and known position –
the GPS app gives the coordinates
(from the precision of ground clocks synchronised
with satellites’ orbiting planes and atomic clocks).
But still, you have to follow the quick of a wren’s mind.
Under a crown of dew-matted bracken, old blood, orange-brown,
a dome of sticks and grass on a bramble crossbeam
with a year-old hawthorn lintel, a couple of weeks into leaf.
Three quarters of a metre above nettles.
And sure she’s momentarily off, kneel.
Snake the burr of your left arm, blind, to the entrance,
then inside, place a fingertip on the whelm of each.
Note: four eggs in total, unpredated, cold or just cooling –
which is the beginning of an answer to everything.
*
See how the rotary ditcher is
making all this, with each pass
the sun jagging off steel, its cutting angles
led by a cyclops laser eye, profiling –
our hauled bulk and radials
gnarling a dream of mud, freshwater,
spuming spoil, excavating great lengths
of foot drains, shallow pools, fresh lymph nodes
off the main dykes. There’s a new fringe
already waking in the wing mirrors,
micro topographies of soil, cleft and lifted
marsh falling back as more of itself. This
nowhere-middle of Berney, below sea level,
the fag-end of a heathen summer,
thundering under a slab of Broadland sky.
These muck scars will not last.
Each pass is to pass on. What is and will yet be.
Here’s grazing for wigeon and pink-feet
in a matter of weeks, where just a season will yield
tussocks of redshank, lapwing scrapes,
chicks about the midge larvae in new wet edges.
We’re no more than tending a body of water
that’ll bloom the tumbling displays to come,
spread primaries mirroring in pools,
flashing the sky’s own outstretched offerings.
There’s all the earth moved. The key turned,
now the heavy-legged comedown from the cab,
back to the hardstanding under your boots.
*
The Pond
TG 34103 06385
Here’s the start of a new sense of things –
just into March, the light and air fuller
and that mallard, so still there at the edge,
her heaviness pending, neck stretched,
not at rest; she can only be considering
her own streaked reflection, herself, held there
in the shade, and in the clay-backed mirror
of water, with no call for contact or confrontation,
just caught in a glance of the ways things are;
meeting a fresh slant of our mirrored selves;
now surely this is how it all begins, continues,
as this one, then another and then another.
Contents List
11 Stand in Late May
12 Reedbed
13 Nest Surveying I, 17/4/17
14 Cults of Broadland
16 Queen Wasp
17 See how the rotary ditcher is
18 Fen Meadow
19 Another Murmuration
20 The Pond
21 Nest Surveying, II, 17/4/17
22 Marbled Orb Weaver
23 Rides
24 Parasitoid and Host
26 The wood is too far a walk now
27 Apocrypha I
28 First Nightingale
29 Loke
30 Wade’s
31 The Dreams of the Salmon Farmer and his Wife
32 The Biology of Spiders
33 Cat’s Eye
34 The Stag at the Gate
36 Hock
37 Second-hand smoke
38 Sedition Song
39 An Acte for the preservation of Grayne, 1566
40 Chemical Chorus
41 Ridge and Furrow
42 Tench
43 Teneral
44 Earthstars
45 Apocrypha II
46 Displays
48 Swallowtail
49 The germ of the world is one place
50 Spores
52 Ballomania
53 Neurone
54 St Mark’s Flies
55 Odonatologists’ Anecdote
56 Amen
57 On the restoration of the cuckoo clock at Dove Cottage
58 Horse chestnut
59 Apocrypha III
60 On the snail in medieval manuscripts
61 Courtship
62 We all have needs
63 Purple
64 Reedbed in August
65 Trespass Song
66 Familiars
67 Sedge Warbler
68 Where four-spotted chasers make a window in the fen
69 Exuviae Survey
70 Nettle-tap
71 Though the singing season’s done with