The light has already cast itself into the dark corners
of this shameful story: a man who was despised
and fell towards death, only for his presence to remain.

Is it such a hard lesson to learn that it is over,
and two millennia past? And yet we mortify ourselves
with holy guilt when we could enjoy these spring days

bursting with the budding leaf, the floating blossom.
Is there really a need for this re-enactment of selfishness
and death?  Are we such poor dumb souls that we observe

a Friday to remind us how it was? There is a presence
in our midst: the Eternal Christ who lives among us,
an incarnate being continually blessing us with love.

Its perspective skewed,
the lie of this land
is all tilts and angles.
Black-thorned hedges
rise in white clouds
to the hilltop farm.
On this Damson Day
it is a damp-mist morning,
the horizon a grey smudge.

Up forest trail and fell-ward,
on the left, a winter-laid hedge,
to the right, a mossy wall.
A riot of new growth lies
at the feet, by the hand:
wild garlic, wilder strawberry,
fresh ferns, and the tiniest violets
hiding on this old path.
Steep steps climb
to a four-acre orchard
primrosed under the pint-sized
trunks of its wiry trees.

There’s the blossom, white as snow.

Hard to imagine
five months hence,
fully plummed and picked,
Bullace and Damascene
driven by the cartload
to Kendal market.
250 tons they’d reckoned
once, taken by train
to the Preston canners.
Nearer home the fruit
was gined and beered,
cheesed and chucknied.

Then into the forest,
a plantation girdled
by a dry stone wall
tall on the moorland edge
where beyond
the grey limestone shards
have broken through what
little grass is left  
for absent cattle.

Wild with wind
up here today,
so down to reclaim
the forest’s shelter,
and down through fields
to a farm en fête
all cars and crowds.

This, a damson day of best-judged jam,
with artisan breads, Morris with swords,
fiddling folk, agility dogs, St Kilda sheep,
blue eggs and tents of crafts galore.

In the mist and drizzle
homeward and facing west,
there across the valley lie
outposts of blossoming,
fields embroidered,
and the farms necklaced.

Grey slivers of water,
turn blue as the lake appears

and being just spring
the still-leafless trees
at the water’s edge
allow sight of wind-filled
sails, a boat tacks too and fro
in the silent distance.

From the Professor’s Garden,
from the shared bench
within earshot of a stream
falling in chaotic music
of water on stone,
a further view takes hold:

of woodland’s gathered green
rising to a moor stained with rocks,
and higher still the rust-brown fell.
Beyond and above all becomes sky,
its processions of clouds
shadowing this laked land.

When the leaves fall
and cover the concrete
with their daring script,
we pause to read their asemic form,
a kind of language universal lodged
deep in our unconscious minds.

With curve and line,
join and stem,
these nothing words reform
again with each gust of wind.

Or pinioned by grass and rain
these natural letters
in the language of leaves
remain - in situ -

and slowly curl and colour,
shimmer with dew,
glisten in sunlight, revealing
their inscription, thus:

*O friend whoe’er you are
I feel through every leaf
The pressure of your hand,
Which I return,
And thus upon our journey
Linked together, let us go.

How is it that one man can work
on one brushstroke (and a few spots)
for almost two years?
I thought about
the oriental calligraphers
who spent a lifetime perfecting
that one brushstroke.
Suddenly,
the silence and loneliness
of the painter’s profession
pierce through my heart.

Leaf shows a simple fold
of translucent green paint
that appears as a gesture
of concealment, of implication,
as if the smallest mystery of nature,
the greenness of a leaf,
was being held and protected
within a fold of pigment.

Small reservoirs of oil and Liquin leak
from the top edge of the mark,
and where the green stroke has carried over
to the frame, the paint shows
as a dark varnish, barely perceptible.

With consummate economy,
Leaf draws together nature and art
and shows how natural things live
within and despite history.

Leaf is about the ‘time of plants’
but also about the long durée
which the single brushstroke spills.
The painted wooden frame was added later.

IV

Dear Frank,

My father, who was the wisest man I ever knew,
thought it the duty of every man, young & old,
to keep an account of his money;
& I very unwillingly obeyed him;
for I was not always so bothersome
an old fellow as I daresay I appear to you. . . .

My dear Father,

I have sent cheque to a repeated bill from Griffin.
A thermometer has come from Kew,
For which I have also paid.

I go on maundering about the pulvinus,
& from what I have seen roughly
in the petioles of the Cotyledons of oxalis,
I conclude that a pulvinus
must be developed from ordinary cells.

I have tried watering Porliera out of doors,
I gave four small cans full in the day
& next morning it was wide open
though for several days before it had been shut.
The ***-plant is very unhealthy I am afraid
As its leaves are dropping off at the stalk.

I was very glad to find that Sachs is dead
against all the people that find
the Descendenz theory in
Ray, Lamarck, Goethe &c.;
Sachs says that he believes some ferns
of the family Marratiaceae sleep . . .

Dear F,

I have finished the long chapter on Sleeping Plants
& sent it to Mr Norman to copy & diagrams to Mr
Cooper.

I am now looking over piles of notes on Heliotropism.
I am more perplexed than ever about life of Dr. D:
Hen thinks it very dull, & wants it much shortened &
otherwise arranged. Erasmus likes it.
Your mother wants parts shortened.
I shall take it on Aug. 1st to the Lakes
& finish it there.

I am tired— Ever yours
C. Darwin

The mist had remained all day.
Curious for April this should be so.
At dawn the garden had appeared
as an undersea world
blue-tinged though
swimming in Palma Gray.
Later the town hall clock
would all but disappear from view.

My heart is so heavy he thought
despite my resolve my good intentions
How will I lift myself above this cold mist
into the sunlight I know lies so near
in the blue sky above?

At the end of the long day
so tired he could barely speak
her name on the telephone
as she bright with good fortune
caressed the ether with her words
her present laughter and her beauty
hidden by distance yet visible
in his memory’s last sight of her
hair on the pillow asleep
as he placed the glass
by her bed and crept
down the steep stairs