Tracing the grain ...

There can be an insistence to feel, and it blunts with waiting. 

I know and love the touch of a keen edge, tested by drawing forefinger across and notice how well it grabs at the lines, fingerprint, of my skin, as shown to me by a long dead mentor, a widely admired Boatwright and example of humanity. 


To pare cleanly across grain, no tearing, and lift the finest of shaves, or plane it smooth and straight matter what the tortured confusion of some woods growth, tangled interlock .... life's terrain. To be challenged, i know i want to learn that grain and work with it, find the beauty it holds, run my exploring fingers and hear its story.

Not all wood is as challenging, some is so clean and straight, will not trouble by warping and cupping and will stay true. You can build with this, have confidence it will serve as a king-post and endure, and attach all else securely, step your mast through it .... Yes, there is a place for that too, and its much more rewarding to the novice to feel confident with it.

I did something (or nothing) at the weekend, after some paddling in the 'forgotten' shallows of childhood memory. I went back to the village where i lived between 5 and 11 years old. The small river was in flood. This is where i once taught myself to row a neighbours dinghy, and dared to ease her backwards, so the stern was precariously on the very edge of the sluice, delicately kept there with my precise dips of oar, my younger siblings trusting me blindly (or sharing the thrill?), to not be drawn over and plunge into thundering foam.

I then strolled, found the huge 'Grandad' willow tree arched right over the river, where i once spent hours, just mesmerised by the flowing water and dipped branches, trailing patterns without end. "Going down the river" was all i used to tell mum, so many times. Cows would sometimes wade in, spoiling the illusion of depths, when the Hawthorn bloomed in close grazed pasture, and the world was all in that valley, between the railway, and the distant rise in the west.

Now, it all looked so small, and aged. Our once freshly built home now looks like a 'retiree's', covered in lichen of generations. 


But the Willow tree still stands so tall, has grown, like me, furrowed and reaching, always..... to the stream.

Colliding with ... reflection

I am sometimes struggling to know if i have 'arrived', who i am with. 

I wonder, or rather suspect, that we should never 'arrive', its not a destination. 

Its probably how things go awry, 
assume 'fit & forget', not try! 

Then i feel need to show clear intentions, show navigation lights, 
with no fickle inventions,
a steady course to comply 
- Avoidance of Collision Regulations.

But, we are not clumsy vessels, deep draught, constrained by channels.

I am sometimes the Albatross, 
skimming wild Southern Ocean
seeing, knowing innately,
a timeless notion. 

Then i am a Tern, so swift and agile, 

plummeting white dart, 

a stone piercing glass, 

confounding blue expectation with its pace, 

no trace. 

I love to dive, Atlantic or North Seas, 

hit chilled water in sharp flight, 

heart stopped in that flash of white happening
inevitability. 

Choose to give up control (love this paradox), 

relish the cruel squeezing cold, 

breath fighting. 

Knowing, achingly being, deeply me, 

feeling hot blood rush to resist the cold grip ... 

.....shouting to be alive!

Faded blue jeans

She wanted to cook us Chicken 'Nigella'
my daughter with bright dreams
and faded jeans.
I fetched her here,
a little late
but it seems,
no faded dreams.
I drove her home
then all alone
I sweep twisted rise
my flat hand seeming to feel the roads shape,
skimming the night,
tracing its pin pricked line.
My eyes flow where
the sky reached down,
ink blotted
to rough sawn water
where ships settle in orange pool.
Turning, dark now.
Bereft of my sweet water
i am pricked by
black, punctured
so painfully sharp
by the tiniest needles
of light,
patterns
i've known
longer than life,
product of
a cats claw moon
all so certain and accurate.
All that is.
The only truth,
predictable,
beyond us,
drawing our lives.
Soft cloud now Eastward blows
chalk dusted,
lost,
to only soft certainty of
faded blue jeans.

Late at work .... amber tears

I came across this melancholy piece i wrote a few years ago ... feels like a "January" moment:


As i look out from the whirr and hum of internetted busy-ness that pretends to be purpose,


I see the futile insistence of rain drops to hurl themselves onto my darkened glass, from an empty world.


They only exist, tip tap, because of the melon glow street light, hovering, supported by blackness, above the shivering Mahonoias


That light sheds its daughters onto the window, amber beads, celestial, no visible link between them.


Newly sacrificed drops rub their way erratically downwards, plotting courses, subsuming all orange pimples in their path, leaving an orange trail like a shooting star.


The trail imperceptibly fades, leaving those randomised beads, no memory of glorious last moments.


Jan 2009