nature – Page 31 – don't confuse the narrator

“continuous as the stars that shine”

I’m still thinking about the perseids, but, even if I hadn’t dropped my camera and broken most of its functionalities, I don’t think it was ever good enough – and I am not skilled enough – to take worthwhile pictures of the night sky. Instead of the Milky Way and meteor scatter, then, the best I can do for a field of stars is these wildflowers that I saw last month in south west England:

non-existent blue

giant fennel plants silhouetted against blue sky and clouds

Adaptation

I could show you a planet where creatures
walk upright on two legs. Seeing
a non-existent blue, they name it sky, and stretch
towards stale light in ignorance. Oblivious
to gravity which anchors them, they carve
each step through swirling gas as if a vacuum
and breathe in toxins unaware. Insular
as paramecia, they can’t converse
with any of the other untold tenant species
of their world. They know no other life.

(I don’t know when I wrote this, but it turned up recently among a set of pieces I’ve been trying to organise. It doesn’t seem to belong there, so perhaps it belongs here.)

notes for a poem

I went for a walk beside a canal the other day and hope eventually to write a poem about the swans I saw there.

Poems can take a long time to actually gel, though, so in the meantime, I’ll leave some preliminary notes here.
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a bee in her pocket

Last time I found a carpenter bee in my pocket, it was alive – at least until I stuck my hand in to find out what was in there and it stung me.

Today, though, the poor thing was already dead when I reached in thinking I must have left a tissue in my pocket when my jeans went in the wash.

I suppose if didn’t put my clothes on straight from the washing line, both of them might have lived, but who irons jeans?

The photo is only intended to give an idea of the size of the creature, and explain why, even desiccated in death, its bulk could be mistaken for a paper hanky. I put the keys there to give an idea of scale, and then remembered this old poem:
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Night visitors

Now that summer is here, we tend to keep the house closed up all day, to keep the sun out. After dark, though, I like to open the windows wide to let the cool air circulate. That means I am a lot more aware of the noises of the different animals during the night.

When we used to feed the cats on the verandah, the food trays would occasionally be left out overnight. They were always empty in the morning.

I came across this old draft in my notebook the other day. I should probably add it to my pile of ‘drafts to be dealt with’ as I’m interested in how the repetition works although I’m not particularly happy with the line breaks. I wonder if they succeed in helping the reader to the sort of short, heavily-paused phrasing that I had in mind.
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