Downland Sonnets : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Downland Sonnets / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
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| 説明 | A reading of the sonnets is now available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3kxlyfzp0Downland PathsDownland paths are arched to contours; their flexed backs maned with broomrapesand orchids. I have felt them shudderwhen I walked them, as though vexedby flies. Nostrils flare: sullen holeswhere beeches have blown over. There are vast eyelids lashed with stubble; dewponds are their glazed corneas. A walker risksbeing flipped over by a fetlock, whenthe wind hits gale-force. There are trackswhich end in hooves. Approach themfrom the wrong angle, and they'll throw you into a tangle of nettles and whin. You'llwear them down, but they'll not be broken in. Downland MistsSometimes on the downs, day is postponed,and at the end of the barley-field, mistmelts into a sea of glumes. The valeis an etching in glass, a glimpsed mosaicof pale illuminations; there is no horizon,or there are many. Old swathes are greentrails leading nowhere. The whole scenemight be sedimentary: a slow settlingof silts and silica beneath the glaze.Time and space condense, precipitate;earth, crops and air make a smoked paneof faded layers - whites, beiges, greys.Spaces yawn. My soul is formed of chalks,clays and the failing breath of dawn. RampartsHow many miles of mist-shrouded rampartshave I walked, soaked to the knees in dew,with the solitary crow ever sentinelahead of me on a bare branch, the vale belowinvisible, or emerging in puddles of lightas though the clouds were melting ice -and I have melted too - melded with chalk,gone eye-high to grasses, become a thistle,a path, a thorn, moulded myself to contoursblurred by stubble, learned the slow andglacial art of undulations, condensedlife, love and sense into an urchin testas the crow has gazed, surveyed with hiswise black eye, evaporated into flight? The Hind Leg of the White HorseThe curve of it is perfect: pure, hammered chalk,calcium-coloured, cutting out and then conformingto the line and sweep of the ancient coombe. Sunlightenlivens it: a whole landscape's equine embodiment.Put your ear to the turf: hear the urgent thrumof his warhorse-heart, white lime coursing throughhis pale aorta, and the inrush of downland airthrough a blanched trachaea, into loamy lungs.The downs become an amphitheatre of respiration:grass-roots get nutrients out of dead bivalvesthrown to ground out of some antediluviansea-bottom. Evening sweats out golden oxygenuntil the horse's breath is set to spill, likepowdered dreams, out into space from the holy hill. The Spine of the DownsThe escarpment lay down to sleep, weary of flight. Its closed eye became raised ground, flattenedat the summit; a long muzzle probed the Vale.The furnace in those lungs burned down to a single,buried cinder, too deep to warm the sward.The tail, vaned as a stegosaur's, threshed abouta time or two, then subsided into the Manger.Great, interlocking vertebrae arched themselves,making Downs, calcified the whole heaving hillinto solid chalk. The breathing shallowed itselfto a whisper. About the hollow, dewy coombe,dragon-legends echoed. Twayblades split the turf.Some days, sunlight stimulates the circulation.The long spine flexes. The creature almost wakens. Downland LightFor Joe ThurstonIt beams in at a slant, lending nimbus-fringes to thistles, blades of grass. Landis prone to tilting; time and distanceturn illusory; perspectives shift, or wilt.Rooks glint white at a moment's glance,lapse into silhouettes. Towns obscurethemselves in vapours. Horizons blur; clouds confuse themselves with hills.The Vale folds into verticals, pleatsitself inwards. We can't be convincedwe're not at the edge of earth. Chalkflutes and shadows taper into voids.Here, one could slip between creases, losegrip on delusion, lean outward and let go.The Moon Above the DownsThe moon gave half of herself overfor the chalking-in, surrenderingto the lapwing's deception. The skylarkeclipsed her, sang, then looped downto the wind-flattened grass. Harescaught sight of her, turned bulge-eyedand bolted crazily, negotiating unseenmazes. Primeval ways revealed themselves:paths made by sheep and glaciers. Windcontinued her slow and whittling work,bearing chalk-dust, spiderlings and seedsinto a stratosphere so immaculate thatthe lapwings fluted starward psalms,and moonglow etched out ancient forms. Downland HarvestWhittled down to stubble, the cut straw revealsthe hills' taut musculature, as though the bladewere practised in the art of making-plain.The thin skin of earth is stretched, tightas drum-leather, over every flex and distension.A bird in flight might pick out striations,bunched tendons, and high on the escarpment,ancient scars, soiled and grassed over: the onlyangular things for miles. Hillsides are fusiform:gigantic lines and curves, laid naked, drapedfor life-class, one scored with an arching, bleachedtattoo. Cold water-courses source themselves in groins; armpits bristle with husks of oats.Have patience - wait - and feel the respiration. Downland ThornsThey cling to places that can't be tilled -ramparts, edges of escarpments, sullen slopes -and thrust out thorns with a wise misanthropy,as if to say, "Axe me, and I'll spill blood."Only the wind is obeyed: it sculpts them,wakes them, withers them in the sere,and when they die, uproots them, rolls their gorgeous torsoes down the coombes.Others have a gnarled agreement with gales,thrust deeper roots, fleck the frozen airwith withered haws, their sagging armsladen with the sodden wool of lambs.They earn the permanence of stones,stark as menhirs guarding ancient tombs. Swallows at West Kennet Long BarrowThere were dull susurrations in the clouds,and a stirring in the ripened wheat,the burial mound sagging under its burdenof wildflowers. Those great sarsenswere dark sentinels, lichen-mottledand looming at the threshold of the tomb.As I probed, the swallows flecked outlike smuts stirred from a dormant furnace,whirling into the atmosphere, the quick,dissonant chit-chits of their distressborne thinly on the wind, rising andplunging whole fathoms, out of fear.I withdrew. Rain fell. I turned to dust.Like struck sparks, they swept into their nests. A Thistle at AveburyRampart, ditch and stone have been herefour or five thousand years; the butterflies,bees and hoverflies were pupal soupjust days ago, resolving themselves intomiracles of wings and compound eyes.Tourists are more ephemeral, cloudinglike midges, dallying at the Cove, hummingaround the Barber Stone, fleeing for pubsand buses - but it's the thistle I've come for,with its chalk-riddled roots, stem fibrousas a hempen rope, and that serried armouryof spines. I crouch, admire, shudder.It's already higher than the smaller stones, spiked for survival, determined not to die. ScabiousLet your eyes slip out of focus, and the bloomsare lilac interpunctions in a meadow almost gold.In a wind, they turn to blurs, and bumblebeesmust cling with all six claws, their eyes knockedby pastel-coloured stamens. The unopened flowersare a stippled green. Petals break out at their edges,turn spatulate. At the centres, half-formed corollasare crosshatched with stamens. Fat spiders crouch,expecting hoverflies, and haired stems are astiramongst the longer grasses. Walk through them: a spiderdrops insensate; butterflies flit to more distant flowers. The heat-haze wafts and sways.Come closer. Stand beside me, with that quietnessof yours, in the gilded meadow all splashed with sky. Downland PoppiesThe sepals fall. Petals flare, crumpledas tissue-paper torn from a gift, and a thinfringe of anthers scatters pollen on the wingsof hoverflies. Landscapes recede: chalkfresh dug for drainage, a blurring slopeof blue-stemmed wheat, a hedgerow markinga road, recumbent breasts of downland hillsand wind-sculpted beech hangers, all slippingout of focus. The petals flake away likefilo-pastry, scatter their wilting crimsonon the heated earth, and the haired stemslengthen, catch themselves in wind, knockagainst the sky. Seeds pour out like smoke,or black ashes from an urn half-unsealed. The MeadowThe drier blades are brittle as grasshoppers' legs,the swathe hissing in the heat. Yellowhammers' voicespunctuate the lazy hums of bumblebees, tweezeringthe air with needled crescendos. Purpled knops,yellow rattles, bright orchis-smudges, sky-echoingscabious and cranesbills, bow under the weightsof insects: marbled whites, ringlets rich as chocolates,tortoiseshells flashing open, and pairs of littleskippers, dropping their hindwings as they drink.Lizards still themselves, heartbeats visiblebeneath their skins. Snakes bask on tussocks.A burnet-moth slips out of a chrysalis, half-wayup a grass-stem, as my soul begins to flit acrossthe meadow, lit up with memories, ephemeral as a skipper. Downland SunsetIt all smashes into silhouette.You'd think the beech branches had turnedto cracks in the enamel - fortuitous breakages -and gradually the sun scorches its coursedown the glass, obliterating smaller twigsin a network of explosions. Sometimesit is eclipsed behind some impossible knot,thicker than a trunk, where the hanger-treeshave coalesced - or perhaps a whole channelhas been bashed out into blackness - greatruptures in the pane, snaking like riverswith inky oxbows, whirlpools and ominous blotsof beechwood. If you could walk through soil,you'd see: questing roots do much the same to chalk.All poems Copyright Giles Watson, 2013. |
| 撮影日 | 2013-08-26 11:32:07 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
| 撮影地 | |
| カメラ | PENTAX Optio WG-1 , PENTAX |
| 露出 | 0.002 sec (1/640) |
| 開放F値 | f/4.2 |
| 焦点距離 | 5 mm |