BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

Tuesday 21st November – the day was wet. Met William by the six-mile stone. The other one arrived today – mad in his raving. They made for the fells. Returning wet and wetter. ‘Water, water,’ it’s been said. I walked the coffin road stalked by or stalking death. Birds’ eggs on the table and the endless stench of endless sheep and their rotting feet. Rain and rain. Sleep brought ramblings of troubled pleasure, a lofty fell destroyer, readings and troubled dreams. Eggs were his prize.

Friday 24th November – a sunny, cold frosty day. A snow shower at night. We were a good while in the orchard in the morning. Fell dark dawning. Rain skeins, washed apples –rotting, stewed, spring’s profligacy –and sends the smoke wreaths curling. We walked and walked along perilous ridges, nature and sheep breathings. On the ridge an early lamb, flayed, with waxen eyes, abandoned by crows – a mother’s shroud in grass. A lamb sacrifice, wool white and ghost born. Another birth, deserted across the sea, the seas of France, another time, another prize. I noted lofty daffodils reeling and dancing on mossed stones. Later circled the moon lake.

2020 – torrents. A floodscape. Water. Mizzled light. Distantly the bells of Grasmere shimmer and rise across these liminal edgelands, a watery stillness not of this world. Dank, ditches oozing as the sky becomes land, and floating clouds coalesce in a murky stillness, as water fowl cut through the shadows. All contours vanished, and earth begins to drown in a watery death which suffocates as hungry rain eats the land. Europe retreats, the land advances –lakes newly born, filled to the margins with the drip, drip, drip of their voracious appetites –seemingly insatiable … Visible again – he, bone and sinewy foot, laid bare –still she is next to him, circled in metal and bounded by stone. And how the daffodils dance.