Days of brief transparency, viewed through a window of ice, lifted. Powdered across the lane. Having a porous cuttle texture as if drawn “using a thin & rather scratchy nib”. A stricter regimen being currently observed, blood temporarily withdraws. Lenthay Copse smokily obscure. Brittle scrapiness of reeds, bones packed tight with air. Fish-spine delicate. A tenebrous rustle, like the breathing of books. Fields growing nothing but stones, bone white, buff white, ivory white, carved by the river Yeo, formerly the Gifle or forked one. Abounding in small flocks among the alders; a c’irm or charm indicating a tinnitus of small bells, blended, a continual weaving of waters. Angel speaks with multitudinous voice. “Thistle-tweaker”, a conflation of thorns with the scarlet forehead becomes the iconography of crucifixion myth, ousting earlier fertile goddess affinities. Its nest a vaginal metaphor; a labyrinth of tender intricacies. Lucina, caged by the fingers of holy infants.

Becoming secretive & depressed in the later months, before the vigorous reassertion of autumn territory. Stakes & ties. Paths of observance newly laid through contusions of aster, sedum & verbena bonariensis, helmeted with bees; offertories yielding a roman tessera, three pebbles from Chesil Bank & a tennis ball. A smell of burning moxa. Sulphur being ground with mercury to form vermilion; glazed with madder, sealed. Red as a releaser (your fat cherry lips), the impossible fury of it all. Oscillograph of the throat, that bob bob bobbing thing. Boundaries constructed from scribbles of sound. Marginals encompass the crossing at North Road, where fifteen burials “very shallow & without coffins” marked the putative site of Swithun’s chapel. Haunter of low places & diggings, befitting associations with early resurrection cults. A bird so hallowed such that, harming it, the offending hand would forever uncontrollably tremble. Bringer of fire from the chthonian levels, that our lives might blaze  inches from shadow; burnt feathers colour of bright fame. Covering the bodies of the dead with leaves.

Being considered as late as the eighteenth century that they spent their months of absence on the moon, an idea preferred to the risible new migration theory. The declension from lunar pastures, a glissade down streams of refrigerant light congealing while filtered through earth’s atmosphere. A millennial count of sixteen on the Sherborne estate recorded as “noteworthy”. Frost-triggered, tumbled by Siberian winds; a fall, falling. Into daylight hours of trance-like stillness. Lines of infection tracing the foundations of the derelict war hospital. The isolation unit, brambled. Aggregates of hyphae form underground cities of mycelia; endless ramifications, the deliquescence of fruiting bodies. Earth pigments, superfine ochres, sepia & sootblack in a complex marbling. Almost present, not quite absent; I am not here, I am something else. Limned in such manuscripts owing to the succulence of their flesh; whole, roasted. Hepatic lobes of beefsteak polypore exude a sanguineous juice; votive gifts pressed into bark fissures: sheepwool, calcite chips, a palm cross, attended by wasps. The pin-feather sought for its precision fineness “to remove the mote from thy brother’s eye”; mounted in silver, to bring a woman to pleasure.

Ring-angels on the radar testament to starling diaspora. From the Greek, psaros, spotted or flecked. Hand against sky leaking through fingers; the point where everything breaks through. Refractive famishings. Flight as a single-celled animal, a granular flow into pseudopodia, pushing towards fission & fusion. The twisting of nuclei form trace-memories of divinatory meaning. Pound Road; domed canopy of the Monterey cypress, gravid with song, counterpointed by five flute-towers of Lombardy poplar in Blacksmith’s Lane. Sugar of hedge-fruits turning to alcohol. Rumours of adolescent sciamachy; the stoning of hanging baskets, toppling of garden urns. Attempted gun-sales at Pack Monday fair; addicts buying lemons at local stores. The passage of saints-days in a watershine shatter of glass: Wulfsin & Aldhelm, Emerenciana & Juthware. Rough music, charivari. Ammoniac stench of the roost inviting various scatological nicknames. (Shitlegs). That petrol iridescence. A breast, “crowded with lustrous stars”.