Yesterday I wrote about getting going again with Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind (there's a link in that post). This poem flowed from a second piece of writing I did yesterday, which I've copied below the poem. The Welsh landscape is coming back to me now ...
And when that fox screamed in the line hawthorn
that marked the field boundary, it was not,
was never, Ted Hughes' Thought Fox scraping
consonants from the thin soil: it wanted blood,
it wanted to breed.
The poet might mistake this for lust.
and so poems of carnal love followed
and the metaphors of the Metaphysicians,
printed on cheap paper, would be underlined
and imitated.
There was an impatience in that fox,
waking me at midnight: She spoke only once,
viciously punctuating my soft dream,
my gentle verses of sweet red roses
and limitations.
There was a fire in the sap of the trees,
the oaks above the caravan on the hill,
the ash so patiently straight and clean,
the cloggy alders by the little streams,
and I feel this still.
The sky is overcast this morning,
a haze of high clouds, and there is no wind,
I struggle to hear the echo of that fox
but in a lull in the noise there is peace,
a seed of hope.
I remember the winter nights.
The caravan was roasting in the evenings. I had a little brick fireplace I'd built myself on a slab of slate, and there was also a gas heater for immediate heat before I got the hazel logs going. But the fire didn't last through the night, and my tiny bedroom was separate from the living area anyway. I used to air the bedding every day, and then sleep with a hot water bottle with the window wide open, except when it snowed. I had two deerskins as the top layer, above the blankets, and these kept the condensation off.
The caravan was in the corner of a damp field, and the hedgerow stretched up away from the road to some rough fields, thicker hedgerows, and the hilltop. One night I woke up with a start. There was no moon, but a little light from the stars. A fox was calling about fifty metres from my bed.
I remember also the cold mornings, using the tepid water from the water bottle to clear the ice from the windscreen of my pickup so that I could drive to work, temping in a factory.
I don't remember which book I was reading that winter, or what exactly there was in my situation then that could have predicted me being here now, in this windowless room in Morocco. I was in a very satisfactory comfort zone, but I was silently lonely. I gave away most of my books and went to China for thirteen years. I planned for it to be just one year, but it turned into more.
Thank you for reading.
