Three Beautiful Things - fen autumn
A field of leeks in the dew, blue like molded copper.
Seeing the moon through the trees and realising that the leaves have gone and that it is dark at six.
The ash trees tossing their leaves in the gale, one side silver against a mounting black cloud
The Collective Noun for Dragonflies
I find that dragonflies often appear to me as half conscious cracks in my vision. Especially the neon blue damselflies which flash like halluciations. A still dragonfly on an apple branch is another thing. That was how I saw them for a long time: solitary, still or so fast that they barely register. Today I discovered another facet.
As I was persuading mortar, pointlessly as it happens, into the gaps between unruly slabs in the patio, I noticed that the flying ants had emerged from the lawn. Up from the lower parts of the garden, over the fence, the dragonflies came. Most were blood red, gashes in the air, some were bigger, black and yellow, some sky blue and green. Hunters on the wing, darting into the grass, performing impossible turns, a few at first and then dozens in the late sun, clicking and buzzing, flickering bronze. The collective noun for dragonflies is a cluster, which is just plain wrong. Some say flight, others a dazzle. They reminded me of the helicopters in Apocalypse now, coming in from the sea, and from there valykries flitting here and there over the battlefield, this way and that, plucking souls.
A valkyr of dragonflies. Now that fits.
Ghosts in the Orchard
The family came to stay, and the Olds and those enfeebled by drink needed beds so I slept in the Orchard. Having reason to walk back to the house in the night, I found myself surrounded by ghostly white plumed moths shaped like crucifixes, their beautiful frilled wings like the opposite of motes of soot in the moonlight as I stirred them from the moonlit grass.
Ten Thousand Words for Green
It has rained until the sky is sore from it. The washes which were meadows are a great grey river which would humble the Thames or the Severn. The ditches are full and if you dig through the black mixture of fen peat and silt which makes up our pregnant earth until you reach the clay, the water runs over it like a conspiracy discovered.
And so everything is green. Even the umbrella plant, though it is indoors, has exploded in its new home as if inspired, its stem ripped apart by new growth and its leaves which were thin and waxy now thick like a succulent's. In the Junes of past years, the leaves would be acquiring their summer's dust. Not now. They are thick and washed every shade of green that there are words for. The beech is so verdant it may never turn bronze again. The grass punches at your feet. The night-planted orchard is enjoying the shyness of the sun. The apples, plums and cherries are still all emerald, like undifferentiated children drinking their fill. The leaves of the sage loll like dogs tongues. The whips that we planted to make into a summerhouse are drinking their fill and their neighbour, the great willow, waves its stranded leaves like a great mane and proclaims its joy to the skies. The shades of green are uncountable and unnameable.
green 