A LAND COVERED IN DARKNESS.
A land covered in darkness. A land grown over with swarths, swards, swads. Remnants of yellow rattle and foxglove beardtongue haunting the meadow, the leasow, the mædsplott, suppressed by tussocky matt. Thistle, nettle, ragwort. Half-buried a broke plough gone to moss and mildew. A ghost pasture. A farmland gone fallow decades prior. The family hung on longer than most. Mosaic ecologies becoming bramble, scrub and tree.
Rough stuff that wears down wildflowers.
***
In the attic under the eaves, writing desk tucked between collar beam and window
I feed a sheet into my Olivetti Roma, manufactured in the 1980s by Olivetti Do Brasil
A travel typewriter with smooth keys, 13pt micro elite typeface, grey case with eye-catching red trim
A detail that recalls the best known works by the architect Lina Bo Bardi
In a cafe across the North and Baltic seas a chronically ill poet reading from a collection of body horrors offers the advice: “Write what you know”
I check the line spacing, the page margins
Lock the paper in place
***
Countryside patina collects unevenly. Falu red, yellow ochre, weathering down to raw wood. Green algae blooming where gutters spill rainwater. You feel similarly exposed to the rough of time, as if gathering moss on bones. Fermenting a forest mould beneath skin. Your self wears a skeleton of old timber that no longer quite fits together. Warped living like doors swollen in frames.
***
I take up very little space inside my hollow
My catch-cold October chamber
Can hear downstairs Rebecka scraping oats from breakfast pan, crackle of kitchen fire, pump refilling with water from the well
While upstairs I'm wrapping woollen blanket over woollen jumper, pantomiming the asceticism of monastic scholars
St. Guthlac in his Crowland Abbey
His hermitage in a fen of immense size with immense marshes, black pools of water, foul running streams, and also many islands, and reeds, and hillocks, and thickets, and with manifold windings wide and long †
And far far older than this two-hundred-year-old cottage
Rebecka shouting, “I'm making second coffee. Do you want second coffee?” and me hunching down the stairs into the warmth, into the smell of saucepan coffee brewing atop iron woodstove
***
Awake to a deep root world of dark beautiful bogs like peat. You breathe in spores. You are a fragile husk of petrified bark. You are tree sap and fungi and sunlight succulent through your tender flesh glows. You are slowed vestigial, reduced to spines. Your stomata transpire to the dawn coo of chorus.
***
699AD, St. Guthlac builds his small cells and oratory into a ransacked burial mound on an especially obscure island
Uninhabited on account of its many horrors — a host of spirits ferocious in appearance and terrible in shape — filling the whole space between earth and heaven †
He endures the loneliness of the wide wilderness until his death in 714AD
He produces no written works in this period and is survived by several Old English poems
***
Still dark mornings
A foundation cold that penetrates several pairs of socks
Several pairs of socks strategically layered, heel to toe, so that none of the holes line up
I touch match head to tinder, igniting a stack of birch and juniper
The latter venting an earthy spice with a hint of berry
I pull my chair close to the kakelugn, kick my feet up on a box of kindling
Opened on my lap the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English
An ex-library tome with one-thousand-eight-hundred semi-transluscent pages leafed like those little bibles you used to find unloved in hotel dressers
I'm reminded that language can work like a spell
A spelling
See also: conjuration, incantation, fascination
Leaning on my chair back Rebecka asks how my writing is going
I tell her I've unearthed a dozen new synonyms for marsh and mire and mud
Enough to cover all four corners
***
Slobber, slubber, lutulence
Malm, turbary, sletch
Muck, mull, mor
Cess, slake, sleech
***
In the garden blue scilla spread among mossy rocks and rotting tree stumps, cross-pollinated tulips swirl vibrant splashes, the horizon a pale swell of cherry blossom
Instead of writing
I weed around paths, around planters, around floriferous mounds bordered by birch trunks
Most of the papery white bark peeled away
Getting lost in days of dirty nails and muddy knees, gardening gloves thin at the fingertips, a little irritable skin poking through
Rubbing one sunburned spot the size of a rice grain
Pearl hyacinth, hellebore, pasqueflower
References.
† Life of Saint Guthlac, Felix (c. AD 740). Translated by Bertram Colgrave. Collected in: Chronicles of the Dark Ages (Folio, 2008).
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