▽ | #analog
· ᚢᚦᚼᚱᚼᛒᚼᛒᛊᛒᚼ ·
▽ | #analog
A coalescing of mourning rags adorned with a splendid array of articles. Obsidian set jewelled in pendants, rings. Filament embroidered scarves. Wrapped in cheap bombazine tapestry your rib-cage hollowed out. The empty space a gulf of vivacity and spirit. Nothing remaining but churning black lungs. Wormhole heart. The unenviable weight of history.
▽ | #relic
An unfolding of crocuses buried by snow-white flurries. Spring sun breaking through wispy streamers † to melt the mountain back down, revealing a slushed wilt of purple yellow flowers. Thawing rays driving phantom mists before them. A soft lantern light pooling on falun ‡ walls.
† Streamer. A bank or streak of cloud.
‡ Falu(n). Red paint traditionally used on Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish houses. Created by mixing mineral rich mining slag.
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Spring cleaning knotted meadow acres. Raking up dried tufts and tussocks. Bennet † matted into banks like rolling sand-dunes. Mounding all together with gaudy-green mosses, leafy muck and mull. The work accompanied by noisy pea singers at the wooded edges. A familiar robin following along, grubbing in the streaked bare soil. This yearly practice known regionally as Fagning: a Gotlandic word stemming from the Old Norse Feja, meaning “to make fine”.
† Bennet. Old stalks of grass.
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Awoken at day-spring by a charm of tits, finches, warblers. The dawning murmuration lifting to fever pitch. Weekday mornings in a sunlit bedroom, listening to the swells of song-fowl over the mountain, chirming, chittering.
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Even if I could possibly hide myself in a tiny dwelling on a rock, where the waves of the swelling ocean surrounded me on all sides, and shut me in equally from the sight and knowledge of men, not even thus should I consider myself to be free from the snare of a deceptive world: but even there I should fear lest love of wealth should tempt me and somehow or other should snatch me away.
Life of St Cuthbert, Bede (c. AD 720), trans. Bertram Colgrave. Collected in: Chronicles of the Dark Ages (Folio, 2008).
▽ | #extract
Formaldehyde skin pulled tight behind a gauzy veil. A grave face speckled with desilvered mirror tarnish, punctuated by two strained eyes widening in their sockets. I watch you growing clumsily in gait and stature. Layering self-mortifying shades of famine. Cheeks etched to cut glass. Lurching side-to-side you waver in the hallway, your weeping crepe projecting poisonous rasping.
▽ | #relic
A brackish archipelago. Faint smell of sea-weed from tideless waters. Reeds and grasses billowing where polished bedrock plunges into the Baltic. A coastline of ash, beech, thick old growth oak. Stoney shores growing juniper, sloe, common heather. Linnets picking over bitter berries. Crowding scant mountain pine.
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A coastal shrub layer of juniper, sloe, packed culms of matgrass. Moraine mixed of boulder, stone, gravel, sand, silt and clay. Formlessly following the underlying bedrock. Two-point-five-million year granite, tundra polished smooth and round.
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A dry scrape of land reminiscent of smoke. Glacial grooves smoothed in frost-blasted granite. A shapeless moraine growing goldmoss stonecrop, purple loosestrife, seaside aster. Guarded by great black cormorants, a half-dozen species of sea-swallow terns.
▽ | #journal