"I come into the peace of wild things..."

I wrote a short story yesterday. Only the second I’ve written in my adult life. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to hear that it’s about a selkie, a myth I have written about time and again. What is it about that particular myth that draws me back, like a moth taptapping at a lightbulb, or singeing its wings at the flame? The romance of salt and sea, of light falling in long slants through deepening water. The idea that you can split the skin between two worlds, and live – however differently – in each.

 

Writing has been my light more than ever in these last weeks. Through the terror attack in the city where I live, and the terrible events in London. Sometimes the world feels like a frightening place, and all I want to do is close myself away from it, keep myself safe with books, and sweet tea, and the comforting glow of a small lamp. Writing reminds me of how wide and beautiful it is, and how wonderfully, marvellously magic. That there is more out there to love and be glad for than there is to dread.

 

The weekend after the attack in Manchester, C and I went out to the country to camp, needing the peace and the clean air, to be out from under the weight of fear. Just before I dawn, I woke up needing to pee. I got up and left the tent, leaving the front door-flap open. When I came back from the toilet block,, C was awake and startled, propped on an elbow. “What’s the matter?” asked him. “A robin!” he said. “A robin flew in and landed on my shoulder. I felt his little birdfeet, and when I woke up he sat and looked and me for a moment and I could see myself reflected in his eyes – they were so black! And then he fluffed himself up and flew back out”. I eyed him sceptically, thinking he’d been dreaming. But sure enough, when I settled back down on the blow-up bed, there it was: a pat of birdshit, small and round as a coin.

 

That this can happen in the same world, and the same week, as a man belted in to an explosive vest kills children with hatred and nails. A timely reminder. That storms can flood a street of houses, then link them with a rainbow’s thread. That for every lamb who opens under the fox’s teeth, a dozen others sweeten their fields with play . There is this, always, after the worst has happened. Always the beauty, always the gifts. It’s how life sells itself, and how we are sold on the world, and all its terrifying eggshell loveliness. 

 

I launched my book last month – at Waterstones in Manchester, where I have spent so many happy hours over the years, and so many of my paycheques. I got to hold my book for the first time – its beautiful cover, all pearly froth and swirl, and my name in neat letters on the front. I will never forget it. The warmth and joy of that room, with its high windows and stacked books – which people bought, and which I signed, afterwards, in looping script. The glass of wine I sipped throughout. The sounds of traffic like surf on the street, and the sounds of glasses clinking, and laughter, and good wishes. How lucky I am to have had that night: how blessed I felt. 

 

And I am truly lucky, I know this. But also there is the awareness, now, that luck takes work, at least in part. That the world will conspire to help if you let it, but you need to be open to opportunity. You need to be open to everything. The older I get, the more passionate I am about shaping my life, rather than letting it simply collect like a shawl around my neck. I am thirty six, and I have a book in the world, and someone who loves me. And sometimes terrible things will happen, but dammit if I won’t keep looking for the beauty that comes after. Which always comes after. Always the rainbow after the rain, the robin after a city hit by violence. Always the smile for a faltering spirit. Life will keep on giving its gifts, if we give it chance. And I for one intend to give it. And give it. And give it.

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, 

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 

I come into the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought 

of grief. I come into the presence of still water. 

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time 

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

"Love yourself as if you were a rainbow, with gold at both ends..."

A weekend in the Peak District, craving the hills and the wild air. My heart is happiest, there. The moment I step from the train into that rinsed light, I am lifted. And especially so this last trip, with snow whitening the hills like a gift. We wore woollen hats and walking boots, and climbed to the sky. Up the cold slopes of Mam Tor, past the cows and dreadlocked sheep, past the cheery hikers with walking sticks and pink cheeks.

What a feeling, breasting that last rise.  The whole world underfoot. Cold white miles of it, beautiful, blinding. The air as clear and thin as a whistled note. The full bowl of the valley brimming with light. 

Never, out there, the dazzled nerves. Never the ditching heart. Only calm, and open spaces. Only wide skies, and quiet, and grace.

Mam Tor holds an extra sweetness for me. I wrote a poem there last year, and it won me my first major prize. There is magic there: I feel it in my bones, the way a water dowser feels the hum of water in his wrists.

The remains of an Iron Age fort in the grass at the top. Take a moment to imagine it. The centuries stilled and kept underfoot. Tell me that doesn't make your heart beat like a butterfly, fast and bright. All those sunk bones in loam, wrecked ships beached in earth. The wild red hair of those buried daughters, winding towards our ankles like weeds. The lost arrowheads, the bowls of rust.

The things I have learned from those high wild hills. To trust in my body, to tend to my mind. 

What is it for, this life? I want to live with clarity. I want to be kindled, to be kind. And I feel it out there, like a thumb on a map: my part, my place. Like a flame that has guttered and whispered almost-out, and then been cupped back to a leaping flash.

I am burning, I am burning. I am finding my purpose, I am finding my way.

"Hello darkness, my old friend.."

It was golden at the weekend. C and I walked the canal into the Peak District, our feet ploughing leaves the colour of blood, of foxbrush, of tangerines. Light striped the green water through the trees, and the underleaf was flush with that lovely light that always reminds me of a jar of honey, a mug of ale. An almost-amber, a  gold that sweetens and warms.

I needed that beauty. The black butterflies with fire in their wings. The squabbling ducks. The pair of swans bent sweetly at the neck like a pair of young lovers, a slow riot of leaves in their wake. But what is it the poem says? Nothing gold can stay.

Lately, I have been feeling unmoored. Small, and soft. Full of doubt. Anxiety winds its roots in me like a weed, and thistles flower in my throat.

From nowhere, as always, this. It has been a long time, but here again is that slant of dark. I move between four places only: bed, and bath; the open flame of the Autumn countryside; the back corner of my local pub, where I read and write undisturbed as the fire pops and throws off its sparks. The familiar is important. The calm. I bide my time and wait the shadow out; I know this game. I light the lights I can, strike the matches of small poems and sink in long baths full of scented foam. 

As jittery as I am, as sick as I feel, there has been no rupture in my self-identity, no quavering with regards to self-care. No temptation to lash out, as I once would have. To cut or starve or stuff. Beneath this sensitive weeper, there is a quiet core of tempered steel. Years in the building, years of pain. The way the oyster builds the pearl from grit. How valuable it is to know that. To be safe in the hands of myself. And this is where those years of therapy prove their worth – that sure and solid floor of bedrock built in neutral rooms, the gold seam of worth at my core.

I am a quarter of the way, already, into a new poetry collection. The first fourth flowering from the root of the last book, which is, until Spring, still that: still root. But new buds are rising from that slow-building heat. New fruit from the old seeds. Look to that, for my assurances. Look to that, for my proof. That I am what? Living, and growing. Learning through doing. Digging through the dark with a shovel of truth.

I pull myself through the nerves with a rope of language, tell myself you have this, you've come through everything this far. And these are the leaps and bounds that put men on the moon. That distant from me. That near.

Sometimes light just takes its time to reach us.  But sometimes it races in the wake of a star.

"I must be a mermaid...I have no fear of depths, and a great fear of shallow living."

I am writing a story about the sea. How many ways there are to say salt. How many ways to describe the nets of light shivering on the water. How many words for hunger, and for deep.

I once wrote here about wanting to become a mermaid. About being an adult who still sometimes dreams of her legs slimming to a single silver point, ending in a sweep of fin. Who tastes salt and imagines breaking out of her true element into a bright slate of sky, the taste of home in her mouth.

Lately, I have been feeling not quite myself. Anxiety rises in me like a drift of smoke: faint, at first, then a choking dark that thickens my lungs. The way blood spilled in water begins as a cloud, a slow-unfurling fog of pink, before it deepens, rusts, and calls to sharks.

It has been a long time since I felt this stirring. I stumble under its weight but I do not fall. I keep on moving, keep on writing. I write of water, and this is how I keep myself from drowning.

There is salt under my tongue. My heart breaks blood against my ribs like a wave.

In my mind's eye, I hold an oyster, my favourite totem. A shut shell with a wash of light inside like a sky. Remember the grit that worked its way in, the irritant, the hardness at the beauty's heart. Remember that this is necessary before the pearl can start.

"To make an end is to make a beginning..."

I write, and time feels geological. Vast and slow. I move through the hours like a glacier, stilled to a cold and concentrated point somewhere deep in my own centre. And then when I’m done, and the last full stop is placed, I blink, and the world comes flooding back, a rush of quickness and colour, sounds so loud I can almost see them, doubling and redoubling in the air.

The poems in my first collection are poems from the start. Of everything, of my life as a writer. Poems from the tap-root, from the well’s heart. I imagine the book as a map: follow a line with my finger, trace it all the way back. Here, I am twenty, and sick, writing in the bright library between doctor’s appointments. Here I am thirty three, in New York, and in love. Here is  a bedroom I remember every detail of. A classroom. An office. Each poem a snapshot. Each poem a journal. Each poem a lovely anchor, fastening me to a time or place.

Some of the words, I can almost taste: the wine I drank while teasing out the tangles of a phrase; the vending machine cocoa, rich brown silt at the bottom of the cup. I remember the paintings that hung on walls, the glossy books thumbed thin. I remember the essays and articles I read – a spark of interest that caught and leapt, and burned, intensely, in my skull’s crucible. And I wrote while they burned, until all that was left was the ash of black words on a white page. News stories. How sounds were sent on discs into space: human voices, whalesong, nightingales. How a herd of three hundred reindeer was felled by a single lick of lightning in a Norwegian forest.

My friend once saw an exhibition in Manhattan – human bodies, split and cut. The heart, visible. The layers of spongy yellow fat. And the one thing she described to me with exquisite clarity: a red net, delicate as wire, hanging like art behind plate glass. A lattice of blood vessels, removed from a once-living body by injecting the arteries with plastic and then dissolving everything but that. These tiny tunnels that once ran with breath, with life; a tangle in the air describing the place they once inhabited.

That is how my poems feel, now. Like an entity separate from myself. They hang together, hold my shape - but they no longer live in the dark of my body.

There is a tribe in the Amazon whose chief wears a cape made from hummingbird feathers. Imagine it - a wake of blue and yellow that falls like fire and sky from his shoulders. But the cape is so heavy that he cannot walk when he wears it.

I come to my writing desk, find the slate completely clear. The first time in a decade it has been this way. I imagine my book, I imagine that bluegold cape. The shrugging off of all that beautiful weight.

How naked and vulnerable it is to be without it. And yet, and yet: how utterly free, how wonderfully light.

"Perhaps one day you touch the young branch / of something beautiful. & it grows and grows".

Months have passed again without my visiting this place. The world turns, and the world turns. I have been writing, just not here. I committed to journaling for a hundred consecutive days, so the words that normally spill into this place have been diverted there instead, like a river forking, carrying its water to the same sea, but travelling its light a different route. And the poems have been coming and coming. My body brimming with them, my bones humming with their bright particular music.  

A week now, since I got the news that my first collection will be published in the Spring. I remember thinking, So this is what yes tastes like. As happy tears fell into my beer, as the pub spun. The weight of all that work, the years of words, the book, there and then gone - fallen out of its life with me, quiet and small, and out to live its own life in the bright wild world. Is this how a mother feels when her child is pulled out from that tucked place under her heart? There it is, after all that growing in the quiet -  fully realised, and breathing. A part of the world now, free of your body, free of your blood.

I am flush with happiness. But there is also a part of me that is small and scared. How I want people to be tender with this soft thing I have made. How fearful I am of it failing, of my tiny fledgling falling, not flying. Which would mean I have failed, and fallen. That my words aren’t good enough (and my words are the best thing I have). I need to let go of that sense of dread, and be glad, only, that my words will exist in the world at all. That my mouth will not be their only home.

A confession: on Saturday, C and I went to the bookshop in the city. I found the place on the poetry shelf where my book will fit – after Paterson, before Plath – and tested the way it will feel. To touch a finger to the shelf and find my name. It felt like belonging. Like my life had both shrunk and swelled to fit that slender space. The sweetest of beginnings, which is also the sweetest of returns. The coming together of me, and home.

(title quote: from "Elegy", by Aracelis Girmay)

"We love because it's the only true adventure..."

 

 

This is the last night in this bed under swallows and roses. The last night with sighing pines behind glass. The last time I will hear the neighbour's children cry, and the last I will bend my spine to fit the shape I have hollowed in this space.

From tomorrow, I live in a city again. And not alone. My breath won't sit in my lungs just now - how it rises, and rises, like the sun in the morning, like bubbles climbing the sides of a flute of champagne.

How words can soften and shuffle. How meanings can shift. How home can be walls in one moment, him the next. Two minty mouths in the bathroom mirror. Four lungs breathing the same sweet room.

"For last year's words belong to last year's language..."

I lie in bed, my ribs bruised from coughing, the wind lashing the wet pines outside my window, so fiercely that it sounds like the sea behind the glass. I can almost taste the salt on my lips. I can almost hear the gulls wheel and scream as they ride the thermals, red tongues flying like flags.

I haven't brought my words here in a while, have been tending them instead in other places. I cycle through phases like the moon. Sometimes, all I can write is poetry, slim little slices that shine in the dark. Other times, I write ripe, and round, and full, and more pages fatten the ever-growing book.

And yet, as always, something eventually draws me back here, the way the moon draws the tide from the sand in foaming sheets, revealing a litter of treasures in its wake: crabs with their hanging claws like picked locks; relics of bottleglass worn smooth and blue; oyster shells, whose insides still swim with that pearly light, like a sunrise is held there, like a secret, like a spell.

I left 2015 with a full heart and a kiss. That was the year I loved deeply, and well. That was the year I wrote poems wrapped in blankets, where my body filled out from all the beer and cheese, and I didn't care, because my belly was happy, and my heart. That was the year I climbed hills wild with heather, saw shooting stars dance on the tip of my lover's finger. The year filled with cocktails, and tender words. The year of walks on the Yorkshire coast with its rolling mists, and sudden tides. The year of New York, and of camping in the Peaks, of pizza and beers in damp, foggy fields, and of laughter, always laughter.

I move in with C in a week or two, and still can't quite believe my luck. That the new year should begin so filled with promise, and with love. Such constant, quiet happiness since I've known him; it still feels like a gift. And so even as I lie here, sweating in my sheets, my chest sounding - and feeling - like it's full of broken crockery, still, still, I feel the wildest, strangest joy. For the year I've just spent, like so many handfuls of gold. And for the next one, already smouldering in my pockets. I can't wait to hold it, gleaming, in my hands. I can't wait to see how it shines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I want to see the Kingdom come / I want to feel forever young..."

 

 

 

 

A twist of red and gold in the leaves of the tree at work, this week; a blazing helix winding in the green, a spiral of fire and heat. Cold lungs in the morning, and frost underfoot, a lace that glitters and crisps where I step. Webs in the fences, the hedges, the gates, stars of silk strung bright with rain.

 

A time of turning, this. The trees to fire, the skies to ash. The clocks turn, too, their fingers spun back an hour into the past. The nights turn cold. Breaths turn to smoke and hang in the air, rolling and fuming like genies let out of their bottles at last.  

 

These days of wiltings and woodsmoke, wool gloves, and leaf-drifts, stars and fogs and fires. The closing out of the old year, a quietness, a settling. It always feels like I'm resting, here, like a bear gone to bed for the season, snug under rugs of earth and fur, dreams full of sunshine and sea-salt and freedom.

The pull is too strong to wait for that last night of December, with its lists of musts and wills, its skies ablaze with noise and colour. The reckoning begins now, for me, as it does each year. The past months gathered in my lap like flowers. I sort with practiced hands through roots and blooms. Some I keep to press into forever. Some I toss, too bitter for permanence, too faded to brighten a future hour.

This, this life: like tending a garden. What do I want to plant in the clean  Spring rains? How will I weather the Winter? I cut and prune, and plan for the coming calendar.

The trees cast off their old greens and burn, and I, too, feel called to change. To rest before the next rising. To contemplate - with clear eyes and a quiet heart -  the next turn.

 

 

 

 

"Autumn days when the grass is jewelled, and there's silk inside a chestnut shell..."

A walk home from work on Wednesday this week, a walk through the alley overhung by trees. I watched my feet move, dappled with light, sun-coins scattered over fans of bone that flexed and flashed, then flexed again. Then a breeze, and a drift of leaves - and the sudden shock of the falling colours, all yellows and bronzes and reds. Who stole the greens overnight, left changelings rusting in their place? Who took the softness, left parchment-paper sheaves?

I am a watcher, a notice, by nature. I see when the stars begin to hang colder, hang clearer. I notice, every year, the first bluebells chiming quietly in the garden. I see the first breath of frost in the grass. I watch the seasonal clock tick steady, even, through each neat quarter. And so I don't quite know how it happened, this year. How Summer faltered right beneath my nose. How brassy Autumn saw her chance and leapt.

How I worried about turning thirty. About leaving the word girl behind like a clue for someone younger, like dinosaur bones laid down in the dirt, the ghost of who I was preserved under fathoms of fragments and dirt. How I worried that I had spent the best of my days, my twenties, in one wild spree, that all that lay ahead was wistfulness, and thickening hips, and a hairshirt of nostalgia and fond memories.

The truth is: the only hurt of "older" is the seasons turn faster. And each one is sweeter and harder to part with than the last.

The truth is: the only thing I lost in my thirties was my heart.

A reminder to myself: Attend to the moments. The moments are important. They keep the stars, and the Poles, apart.

And so I write it, I set it here. I cast for moments, and I catch them: a wriggle of glitters, like fish in a net; a line of lights in a softly glowing string.

I realise now that the moments are the bones. The heart's-blood, the breath. The moments are the molecules and the moments are the cells. The carbon and the stars. The real, secret shape of every living thing.

 

 

 

 

"I come into the peace of wild things..."

I live, now, in a city, where the buildings nick the sky, and the streets are quick with chatter and with feet. I live among a million shades of grey, the primary colour of every city - grey pavements studded with gum, grey pigeons with petrol-spill skullcaps and pink club-feet, grey cigarette smoke curling and drifting up to grey dishcloth skies, grey tramtracks in their clean steel lines, which make me sad, sometimes, the way only an incurable romantic can be sad - the way they run alongside each other from beginning to end, but never, ever, get to touch.

I love it, mostly. The lights, the noise. The way the sky looks like a mosaic between the officetops, cut into patches and boxes of blue. But sometimes my heart swells for the quiet, and I ache for wildness and green, crave rolling views of cool blue mountains, water braiding itself neatly over stones.

I forget sometimes how close we are to all of that. Just half an hour on the train, and it's like Alice stepping through the looking glass - everything reversed, the same world, but not the same, full of light and colour.

Yesterday, we went out to where the villages sit in tiny clutches in the folds of the hills, velvet folds of green and gold and brown, patched all over with heather, bright purple. We walked where the air was so clean and clear, it made our shocked city-lungs sit up in surprise, and the water was bone-cold, weaving its gold-green way through the fields.

We drank beer that tasted of lemons in a tiny pub with views as far as the eye could see, and I felt a sudden surge of love for it all, for everything. For C, his hand resting on my knee, traces of silver powder from his work beneath the crescent-moon of each fingernail, so that it looked like he'd been handling frost, or making constellations. The air that made every breath feel like a gift. New freckles like stars on my sunkissed shoulders.

I write these posts, sometimes, and I wonder if I've anything left to say. It's not that I don't love writing them, because I do, truly - stringing the words together like pearls, polishing them until they gleam - but I wonder how many of you still find them interesting to read. Is happiness - the calm, quiet kind that you live in day after day - remarkable enough to read about? Once I wrote like a hummingbird, all frantic beating, wild colour, and fervent heart. Now I am more like a Jersey cow - sureness and solidness, quietness and calm.  

I am at home in my life, and happy in it. It is more than I ever hoped for. But my writing style has changed because of it, has lost its edges and sharp corners. Writing fiction, writing poetry - those things are different. They have their own sharpnesses, their own characters, their own clean points and lines. But I feel like my blog posts have softened like butter left out in the sun, melted into one long lovely golden smear, the same words carrying from one to the next like a smudge pulled by a thumb: I am happy; I love him; I am full of hope.

Blue dusks and gold dawns, early-morning mists that wrap bare ankles like cats, or smoke. Beer in the sun so the glass glows with light like a lantern. His hand on my knee. All the words of the world in my throat. I want to do this forever, even if the readers peel away, in time, like birds in Winter, tiring of the same words, looking for different skies.

I want, almost more than anything, to touch people with my writing. I want to leave something beautiful in the world. But maybe that will happen through writing of a different kind. I write here hoping that people will leave with something - a scrap of truth in their teeth, perhaps, or a thought clutched in a fist - but ultimately, I write for myself - for the pure joy of it, but also to keep something beautiful to look back on from my future, like roses pressed between the pages of a book - yes, look at the petals, I remember this; I can still, if I breathe in deep enough, catch the scent.

Maybe it's her I write for most of all, that future self. I know how she will treasure the moments her own ghosts trapped and kept - the words in the library, the bones in the cool museum halls. This is my way of preserving my life - like butterflies in frames, like diamond-hard beetles pressed in amber, pressed in jet.

"Into the blue, into the blue blue blue..."

Summer this year is the X on a treasure map: a spill of light and gold that we know is out there, but is proving impossible to find. It is buried under weeks of stone-greys and mizzling rains, the occasional glint of a sunny afternoon like a lone coin under a boot-heel. Where is the prize? The cache of gold mornings, the smelted afternoons, the doubloons of a hundred suns, glinting, glinting?

There is a heat that runs beneath the surface of the days, but the sky remains cloudy, and blank as a slate. It feels like living in the space between one thing and the next, the white empty place between parentheses. It feels like being the open eye between two blinks, looking and looking and seeing only the same grey horizon, never any closer, never any further away.

There are moments of loveliness. Golden hours scattered here and there like clues along the trail. Last night we sat in the fields while the sun blazed, watching the trees scatter light across the grass like breadcrumbs, like petals, like flung gleaming seeds. We drank beer and toasted, at last, to Summer. We sat until the evening deepened into dusk, and the birds quieted, and the bats came out to replace them, cleaving the air with their quick slicing flight until it seemed that the whole sky must rain down in a tatter of confetti, a shredded shower of stars, of night.

C asked, What is your favourite thing about the Summer? I knew, immediately. Those hours, early evening, after a long, hot day, when it's just beginning to blue and cool. The gloaming, they call it. A sort of early twilight. When the sky deepens into the most gorgeous, radiant blue, a blue I've never seen anywhere else in life, that I don't believe exists anywhere else - not in a Grecian sea, or on a butterfly wing, not in a pottery glaze, or the painted folds of the Virgin Mary's robes, or the gas-flame blaze of a lit Christmas pudding.

I said, simply, The evenings. When it's blue.  

I saw a fox once, on one of those blue evenings. I was waiting for the train in the richness of that light, the hush of the notquitenightnotyet. She detached herself from the shadows between the tracks like a flame peeling off from a fire. Nose testing the air. Delicate steps, like a ballerina. I stood like stone, the only thing moving my hummingbird heart.

What can I tell you about a moment like that? The world compacts. Two points on a compass. Two creatures under the same sky breathing the same blue dark.

And then the train came, rattling the moon, and shattered that brief and blinkless world apart. I remember looking away for a second, looking back - and the wild thing was gone, dispersed like smoke, back to her nest of earth and birdbones, her cellar of tree-roots, her ceiling of moon and stars.

These are the moments I remember when the grey days smear and blur. The splashes of colour, the glimpses of treasure - red fox, blue dusk, bonewhite moon. The lovely hum of magic in the air.

 

 

"Give wine. Give bread. Give your heart back to itself".

The same question I asked last year, and the year before that: where do the hours go? And the weeks? And the months? Sometimes I feel like my life is an abacus, with a child in charge of the beads, slinging them from one side of the frame to the other so that the numbers accumulate so much more quickly than they should. Or a handful of sand that won't rest on a palm, but lifts in the wind and is gone in a spin of scratch and glitter.

I went to New York in April with C, for two long, beautiful weeks. We walked the grids of the city until our feet were threadbare, drank American beer in the park with the grass wrapping our ankles. We spent hours inside the 911 museum, and I left salt tears on the floor there. We drank Manhattans in a bar above the skyline and watched the clouds turn pink and gold; saw seagulls wheel and scream from the boardwalk at Coney Island. I took photographs of everything: the oysters we ate in a rooftop jazz bar; the Brooklyn bridge spoking out against the sky; the seats on the subway, the colour of Spanish oranges; the elegant brownstones frothing with magnolia flowers, miles high.

 

What else?

I've been writing. Writing hard and fast. The cheap book, the one I've pinned my hopes on like a flower pressed between pages. Between a wish and  dream. It's not good, exactly. It's not the poetry I want to write. It's not careful or elegant. It doesn't make me swell with pride. I won't even write my own name on the cover. What it is, is easy. What it is, hopefully, is a means to an end. And so I keep on, and my heart is on pause, and the words mount up, a pile of pebbles building a little bridge.

And also.

Sunday lunches with cold beer in the sun. Writing poems on the train trips home, as the city recedes and fields flash by full of cows, full of wheat. Friday nights in pyjamas. Bottles of wine. Long, lovely Saturdays where he works and I write, he sunk in his passion, I in mine. Impromptu trips to countryside farm stores to fill our basket with garlic-stuffed olives and elderflower wine, and cheese, and smoked meats, and eggs, and fish. Movie nights under blankets. Playing rock paper scissors on the weekend mornings to decide who gets up to make the coffee. Painting the walls of his house, room by room, so that when I move in, it's new, and ours, and clean, and shining like a newly minted coin.

And then.

Sending out poems, like casting glass bottles out into the sea. Waiting for the emails and the letters to return with a yes or no. Waiting for the journals and anthologies to come with my words pressed into them like footprints in snow.

 

These are the simplest and happiest days of my life. It's not about having money, or silk skirts, or clavicles so hollow that rain can collect there. It's the quietest things: good food. Enough sleep. Reading until my eyes are so full I feel they could burst, and send sentences out like confetti. Kisses goodnight and good morning. Corralling wayward paragraphs to make a book, like herding sheep after errant sheep until finally they co-ordinate, a single, substantial flock.

If I could wish, now, for anything, if I could rub my thumbs on a genie's brass lamp or spy the wink of a falling star, I would wish only for this. To keep making these quietly shining days. To collect them, like lights on strings. Like pearls at a throat. Like fireflies burning moon-bright in a jar.

 

 

 

Strange Little Poems

NaPoWriMo begins today, and continues through April. I do this every year - come here, to my laptop, with the intention of filling the month with poems - and every year, I work through the same sad cycle. I write, at first, at a glorious white heat, all flash and fire, all struck spark. After a week or so of a poem each day, the heat goes out a little, and only glows. Then finally, by the end of the month, there's little left at all -  just a slow gold smouldering in the grate. A line here if I'm lucky, a single image there. An exquisite state of frustration every writer knows.

 

How to find the minutes, when the hours slip through the fingers like small change. How to find the words, when the brain has gone mute. It feels like waiting for lightning to strike. To be scorched by it; to be that lucky.

 

I wanted, this year, to create a space specifically for those April poems. An empty space I cannot help but want to fill. A space that is invited-readers-only, and therefore, somehow, safe. A way of holding myself accountable. An organised base from which I can link to the blogs of other NaPoWriMo writers, and read some new poetry. 

 

Maybe it will help keep the momentum going. Maybe not. Maybe the words will still leave at some juncture like the snow geese heading South for Winter. But I hope not. I hope.

 

If you're interested in reading, if you're participating in National Poetry Writing Month yourself, if you want access to the poetry I'll be putting on the new blog, please leave your email address in the comments so I can add you to the list of invited readers. I don't want the blog to be public as a lot of magazines and journals won't publish poetry that has appeared on open blogs as they consider it 'previously published', but I do want to share NaPoWriMo with as many of you as possible, whether you're along for the ride or just enjoying the view...

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite..."

 

When the weather is grey and wet, this city is a mirror. Rooftops slick with rain throw back the sky, and the sky returns the world a thousandfold in its drops. You can see the stars in the street: I love that. I walk through puddles just to shatter constellations, stand and watch them shiver, break apart. They recover, eventually. Everything does. The ripples stop sending themselves out, and the water settles, and there is the whole universe again, burning steadily underfoot, at once infinite and the size of a fireside rug.

Sometimes I am so struck by wonder that it feels like a bruise. Water, and light. Stars, and darkness. Moons, and poetry, and love.

These sweet weekend mornings, when I get to wake up with C, and he absently threads my hair through his fingers while we talk in that soft slow intimate way that you have when you've just swum up from sleep, and snatches of dream are still tugging at your ankles like underwater-weeds.

The long blonde slices of light the sun sends through the blinds to stripe the wooden floors like sleeping tigers.

Those rare days when the sun is snuffed out like a candle-flame between finger and thumb. I stood in the dimness of last week's eclipse, struck dumb by the oddness and the beauty of it all. The light was tea-coloured, and everything was strange, and it felt like the end of the world. I thought,  maybe I've died already, hundreds of years ago, and somewhere in the future, my daughter's daughter's daughter is holding a sepia photo, fingertips finding her shadows in my face, and the bit of me that lives in her, the cells in her blood, the strings of code in her bones, is calling back across the centuries like an echo: hello, hello, hello.....

It seems that magic is everywhere. It is hard to explain. Its not that I'm in love, which is its own wonderful thing and has its own sort of magic, but also has its own particular trail of fears foaming in its wake (what if I lose him, what if my heart breaks, what if I hurt him, what if he doesn't stay). Its not that I'm happy, because happiness, I know, comes and goes like the light does, like the rain.

It's more that I feel whole, somehow. And not from being half or part of something else. I am whole in myself. I'm not sweeping scraps of myself under rugs, or chasing thoughts, like spiders, into corners. There is light in every nook and there is light in every crevice, and if it shows up the dust sometimes as well as the good, at least it's honest.

There are nights when I wake and worry, still, and the second between each clock-tick lasts for days. There are times when the mirror isn't kind, and the old ghosts clank and rattle their chains. But mostly, I am good. Mostly I am grateful.

For the breaths, and the words, and the breakfast eggs. The kisses. The glasses of wine. The church bells that come through the trees on Thursday nights when the ringers have their weekly practice. The scented candles, the sweet plum tomatoes clustered on the vine. The daydreams. The poems I read that go off in my mind like tiny fireworks, glittering, gold.

Today is cold, and the sky is wide and white like a sheet. The rain is flying, a hundred thousand scattered beads, and my wellington boots are on. I have my keys, my woolly hat, my purse.

Contemplate the wonder of your own life. I'm off to shatter the Universe.