A formally experimental lyric journal in a state of continuous flux. Written from my home on Sofie’s Mountain, Sweden, with occasional diversions to London, UK. Texts are interspersed with analog multiple exposure photographs.
The journal is intended to be read in chronological order. For the purpose of bookmarking, a hyperlinked table of contents is included below.
I. A LAND COVERED IN DARKNESS.
II. SOME ROUTINE SUNDAY MORNING.
III. I SIT BENEATH THE SHADIEST TREE.
IV. FIRED SOILS CRACK AS ANCIENT
STONEWARE.
V. BUT MOR CESS AND REEDS AND
HILLOCKS.
VI. STEADY RAINS PASS THE EQUINOX.
A land covered in darkness. A land grown over with swarths, swards, swads. Remnants of yellow rattle and foxglove beardtongue haunting the meadow, the leasow, the mædsplott, suppressed by tussocky matt. Thistle, nettle, ragwort. Half-buried a broke plough gone to moss and mildew. A ghost pasture. A farmland gone fallow decades prior. The family hung on longer than most. Mosaic ecologies becoming bramble, scrub and tree.
Rough stuff that wears down wildflowers.
In the attic under the eaves, writing desk tucked between collar beam and window
I feed a sheet into my Olivetti Roma, manufactured in the 1980s by Olivetti Do Brasil
A travel typewriter with smooth keys, 13pt micro elite typeface, grey case with eye-catching red trim
A detail that recalls the best known works by the architect Lina Bo Bardi
In a cafe across the North and Baltic seas a chronically ill poet
reading from a collection of body horrors offers the advice: “Write
what you know”
I check the line spacing, the page margins
Lock the paper in place
Countryside patina collects unevenly. Falu red1, yellow ochre, weathering down to raw wood. Green algae blooming where gutters spill rainwater. You feel similarly exposed to the rough of time, as if gathering moss on bones. Fermenting a forest mould beneath skin. Your self wears a skeleton of old timber that no longer quite fits together. Warped living like doors swollen in frames.
I take up very little space inside my hollow
My catch-cold October chamber
Can hear downstairs Rebecka scraping oats from breakfast pan, crackle of kitchen fire, pump refilling with water from the well
While upstairs I’m wrapping woollen blanket over woollen jumper, pantomiming the asceticism of monastic scholars
St. Guthlac in his Crowland Abbey
His hermitage in a fen of immense size with immense marshes, black pools of water, foul running streams, and also many islands, and reeds, and hillocks, and thickets, and with manifold windings wide and long
And far far older than this two-hundred-year-old cottage
Rebecka shouting, “I’m making second coffee. Do you want second coffee?” and me hunching down the stairs into the warmth, into the smell of saucepan coffee brewing atop iron woodstove
Awake to a deep root world of dark beautiful bogs like peat. You breathe in spores. You are a fragile husk of petrified bark. You are tree sap and fungi and sunlight succulent through your tender flesh glows. You are slowed vestigial, reduced to spines. Your stomata transpire to the dawn coo of chorus.
699AD, St. Guthlac builds his small cells and oratory into a ransacked burial mound on an especially obscure island
Uninhabited on account of its many horrors — a host of spirits ferocious in appearance and terrible in shape — filling the whole space between earth and heaven 2
He endures the loneliness of the wide wilderness until his death in 714AD
He produces no written works in this period and is survived by several Old English poems
Still dark mornings
A foundation cold that penetrates several pairs of socks
Several pairs of socks strategically layered, heel to toe, so that none of the holes line up
I touch match head to tinder, igniting a stack of birch and juniper
The latter venting an earthy spice with a hint of berry
I pull my chair close to the kakelugn, kick my feet up on a box of kindling
Opened on my lap the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English
An ex-library tome with one-thousand-eight-hundred semi-transluscent pages leafed like those little bibles you used to find unloved in hotel dressers
I’m reminded that language can work like a spell
A spelling
See also: conjuration, incantation, fascination
Leaning on my chair back Rebecka asks how my writing is going
I tell her I’ve unearthed a dozen new synonyms for marsh and mire and mud
Enough to cover all four corners
Slobber, slubber, lutulence
Malm, turbary, sletch
Muck, mull, mor
Cess, slake, sleech
In the garden blue scilla spread among mossy rocks and rotting tree stumps, cross-pollinated tulips swirl vibrant splashes, the horizon a pale swell of cherry blossom
Instead of writing
I weed around paths, around planters, around floriferous mounds bordered by birch trunks
Most of the papery white bark peeled away
Getting lost in days of dirty nails and muddy knees, gardening gloves thin at the fingertips, a little irritable skin poking through
Rubbing one sunburned spot the size of a rice grain
Pearl hyacinth, hellebore, pasqueflower
Abbey
Asceticism
Atop
Attic
Bark
Beam
Beardtongue
Best
Between
Bibles
Black
Blanket
Blooming
Body
Bogs
Bones
Bordered
Burial
By
Catch-cold
Cells
Some routine Sunday morning — oily breakfast in my belly — fried eggs and potatoes with a mix of drying beans tossed in tomato slices, green onions and herbs
A kitchen garden meal to bolster against my still cold attic chamber
The roof awash in rain sounds held back by wooden beams and tiles
Enveloped in fuzzy white noise — me and Rebecka at a 2017 Slowdive gig in an intimate venue with church acoustics — my typewriter rhythm section backing a chorus of reverb trails with loooooong decay
I run my hand over a knot on my scrap wood desk, an unsanded patch, a splinter in my pointer finger
A small intrusion jammed inside for the rest of the week
Channeling a state of ‘apophatic wuness’ the Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard, wearing dark glasses and habit, hunches over his Olivetti Lettera 22, his quarters loud with the clack clack clack slide clack clack clack slide of a craftsman’s keys
Constructing a radical architecture of shimmering letterforms
His great work performed at a simple desk with a simple chair, his room furnished with a simple bed befitting the austerity of his monastic order
Around him the stone walls of Prinkash Abbey erected in 1520, supporting a brace of shelves that bough under a collection of theological, philosophical and modernist importance
Chair
Chamber
Coffee
Collects
Conjuration
Downstairs
Dozen
Earthy
Eaves
Endure
English
Enough
Especially
Exposed
Farmland
Fermenting
Floriferous
Forest
Foul
Foundation
Fungi
An unexpected spell of warm November weather
Me and Rebecka throw off jumpers, hats and gloves, take our daily walk along the old road lined with leafless birch
We check the time before we dart across the tracks, clambering up a verge of gold and copper seed-heads — Deschampsia flexuosa, Hypericum pseudomaculatum, Trifolium arvense
At the top we side-step a stone wall tumbled where the railway line bisects
A hollow cut across farmlands and pastures long since converted to spruce plantation
By no means a hermit dsh arrived on the scene like,
‘a beatnik from the Middle Ages time-transported to the delirium of London’s avant-garde.. full of the language of beat poetry until, in 1962, concrete poetry emerged and under his hand became a symbol for demolished boundaries’3
In the two weeks it takes me to shit out this piece I read essays by dsh on the intersection of poetry with
Art with
Meditatory approaches to writing
‘GIVING UP ANY POEM-PRACTICE DEPENDING ON LIVING INSIDE THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE - ON WORDS AS THE MEDIUM OF CONSCIOUS BEING’4
I am surely producing my own words all the while but where they go in the days afterwards is a mystery
My attic study converted to a fattening silo for false starts — I write on a post-it note that, ‘This Machine Kills’
Stick the post-it to the detached travel lid of my typewriter
‘nothing is getting written, but I think that what I do is write. I think this because I have fragments all around, and I am sure that I have not written them, yet they keep showing up, and I keep meaning to but never do turn them into something.’5
Garden
Gathering
Ghost
Glows
Gone
Grey
Gutters
Haunting
Heaven
Hellebore
Hermitage
Historical
Horrors
Host
Hyacinth
Igniting
Immense
Incantation
Kindling
Land
Language
I try to drink less coffee
Try to fold myself into the materiality of the house, the way that poets try to fold themselves into landscape in pursuit of the sublime
Starting at the attic window at an angle framing only treetops and
Working my way down
A crooked doorway, a sunken threshold, a misaligned frame measured in famnar and tum by rough farmer’s hands
‘how can words keep anymore their mindstab meaning outside our dissolving thought-outlines & loss of contact with long ago million years & more extinct 20th century as proved by potassium argon analysis of recent dugup bits of poets?’6
Half-way down the road, mud-suck splattering my battered assault boots, we stop outside the increasingly derelict cottage
The fourth of four houses on Sofie’s Mountain — two of the four abandoned to time
Uncommon white facade decorated with colourful mosaics depicting native tit species, the garden a collection of marshy ponds, self-seeding Cox Pomona apple trees, escapee Spiraea salicifolia
We look for the telltale signs of roof collapse, the slough of tiles, the sag and sink of wood rot
Over condensing breath Rebecka asks,
“How many Winters do you think it has left?”
I sit beneath the shadiest tree in Peckham Rye Park
Oak canopy reaching twenty metres in diameter
Full leaf boughs ornamented with noisy parakeets
I’m dressed all in black despite the sun
Across the lawn three generations of friends and family chatter in contact fusion, barbecuing beef and catfish in sticky brown glazes
Everyone marinating together in the fragrant smoke
I watch as X____ stretches her arms around the two-hundred-year-thick trunk, enveloping as much of the knotted stem as she can
Blackberry lips reflected in the fridge-freezer section. Our something at first sight superimposed over a packet of tofu. A dozen oranges tumbling down the market aisle. A tributary of citrus orbs confluxing with a delicate phalanx of phalanges. The performance of her femur and pelvis in orchestration with these appendages. Bending and scooping. Flexing. Extending. Rotating. The fruits passed in sleight from hand to hand.
Heat ripples from the dewy skirts around the burst of ornamental beds
Azalea, magnolia, rhododendron
I sit in the recovery lounge and, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all
The same clinical sterility with an underfunded NHS grubbiness collecting in the cracks and crevices
The click slurp of antibacterial gel dispensers
The paper half-cup of cooling vending machine coffee
X____ sitting next to me with the woozy indifference of general anaesthetic wearing off
Waiting for a taxi because nobody in the city owns a car and certainly not us
To pass the time X____ tells me everything her doctor told her about idiopathic disease
Which is, “any disease with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin”
click
I peer down into that still black coffee pool
slurp
In the park everything blurs in diaspora
Everyone converging on the Summer
I watch X____ with her arms still wrapped around the oak
A young William Blake who, in the year 1766, was rapt by a Peckham Rye Common vision of,
‘a tree filled with angels with bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’7
I lay back on the grass and indulge my pareidolia in the clouds, daydreaming about leaving the city
Clouds as forests, as lakes, as mountains
’So I remained with him, sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep.
By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city. Beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black but shining.’8
In the Clock House overlooking the Common I order an overpriced house white
To distract myself from the maximalist etsy grotesque interior I read about how oak trees have evolved to hollow themselves out as they grow, to conserve energy and stabilise their massive weight
How populations of oak stag beetle are declining globally due to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat
Even in cases where oak woodlands remain they are often broken up into smaller, isolated fragments. This fragmentation makes it hard for beetle populations to connect and breed, reducing genetic diversity and species resilience.
I run my wetted fingertip around the rim of the bulbous wine glass until the sharp whistling gives way to a hairline fracture that splits the glass from stem to rim
I get up and leave the pub
Somewhere in the maze of vaults I pass my card to a Nico fringed bartender wearing vintage Mary Quant
I’ll be your mirror9 stuck in my head while I run up my tab on vodka mixers served in crunchy plastic cups
‘I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset’
I try to focus on the rumble of the railway over the arches indistinguishable from sub-bass, the steady drip drip drip of porous London Stock Brick
My right boot in a puddle where a loose slab slups rising groundwater10
Viaduct. noun. (1816). An elevated structure consisting of a series of arches or spans, by means of which a railway or road is carried over a valley, road, river, or marshy low-lying ground.
Elevation implying its opposite — a depression, a downland, a basin
(abyss, chasm, trench)
Shaking off a wet jean cuff I push to the front of a stage where a billowing opium fog obscures synthesizer and pedal board and reel-to-reel tape machine
For the next hour I watch as X____ channels her spook acoustics — somewhere between Grouper and The Ghost Orchid11 but more like the intemporality of unlimited time — through a typically dour London crowd that sways as if
‘The light on your door to show that you’re…’
On the rainy bus ride home my black hoodied head slumps against the dirty glass of the upper deck window, I have ambient bedroom drones playing on my headphones with the volume dialled low enough to hear the tinny 2-step rhythms and clipped soul samples leaking from another passenger’s phone speaker12
I watch two tanned women under an umbrella smoking and drinking espresso outside a Turkish café, a tall pallid man in a suit pissing up the shuttered window of a Poundland, once a busy pub where the magician Austin Osman Spare exhibited his portraits of working class locals
That night I dream about
sinking
down
into rooty subterranean spaces
Jerusalem, plate 76,
‘a few white lines indicate the tree’s roots; some jagged lines form triangles (trees? mountains?) center right’13
The inscription etched in the lower center confirms the identity of the figure crucified on a fruit-bearing tree, though there is debate over which of several trees named in Jerusalem are to be associated with the one pictured
Possibly the plate is a merging of the tree’s of Life, Good & Evil, and deadly Moral Virtue, with the trees of The Oak Groves of Albion, the most terrible form of the oak assumed by Blake’s prophetic visions
Covering the whole Earth with,
‘dark roots and the stems of Mystery upon which the Druids sacrificed their victims’14
Down to underwear me and X____ give the bedroom a chance, suffering the viscous humidity of an attic conversion in a Victorian housing stock
Draughty rooms somehow mouldering year around
After half an hour we’re voiding an over-cautious contract and making our escape through a hallway window, climbing onto the flat extension of X____’s partitioned townhouse
We take turns flicking lit matches off the roof and counting the seconds before they blink out, picturing a rural night sky dark enough to watch trailing rock and dust ignite in the atmosphere
Kids shoot a grime video in the stairwell of a newbuild up the street, our neighbour sits in the gutter playing guitar
He croaks folk songs in familiar Brazilian Portuguese and we decide he misses some part of something he used to call home
While writing this I have the not-entirely-unpleasant sense memory of melted tarmac fumes
Me and X____ talk until late but I can’t remember a single thing we talk about, and looking back I can only imagine the things we might have talked about, because the whole point of memory is the forgetting
In a photograph I find on a usb stick our faces are obscured by digital artefacts conjured by a phone camera struggling in low-light
I remember that,
‘technology has made us all ghosts’15
The night curls up around us like a ribbon, the roof floating on updrafts, on steam
Gilchrist, his first biographer, relates how,
‘Blake was diagnosed as a sufferer of extreme and persistent visual hallucinations, a man who painted from spectres, and had lost his grasp on reality. His may be deemed the most extraordinary case of spectral illusion that has hitherto occurred.’16
I follow the synchronicity present on the final page of his 1793 work, America A Prophecy, in which Blake depicts a colossal white-robed figure bowing to the earth besides,
‘three lightning-scathed oaks, each of which, as if threatening heaven with vengeance, holds out a withered hand.’17
I begin to notice frequent holey imagery appearing in my notebooks, journals, drafts
Holey as in foraminous, perforated, full of gaps or breaches
Nothing pertaining to the Divine
Fired soils crack as ancient stoneware. Amputated boughs slump to heat-kissed orchard, pale dirt. Each day another scorched earth policy. The garden blooms its pallid clumps. An open wound of chronic maladies. At least the rugged weeds in fervour and by god the all fermenting stench. You shrug off blistered skin but
Words cannot convey your faith in ruins.
Getting to Sofie’s Mountain takes us one full day in a rental van across seven countries with no room to pick up the friendly anarchist hitchhiker at the Netherlands services
We eat uninspired sandwiches and marvel at the monotony of Western European motorways, repeating the same Fugazi and Lungfish albums, pulling after one-thousand-five-hundred kilometres onto an old road emptied of traffic
Norwegian spruce flanks interrupted by farmsteads with bell crowned barns, falu red with white frames
Gotland sheep pastures penned by zigzag roundpole fences, built from saplings, tied with peels of bark tightening as they dry
Buzzards perching atop the tallest posts
‘At last we reached the hills, just at nightfall of the next day. We were past caring — we came over the flat, open land at owl-time. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it’s not that simple.’18
Heat makes the roof of the cottage crack and pop, the timber frame contracting as humidity wicks away to zero
Every day a drying day
In the kitchen Rebecka complains about her bandaged knee while I tense and untense my right arm overextended from a weekend chopping logs
We small talk solar showers and the routine threat of scarcity, shallow sink ablutions, saving and recycling every drop
(I truly understand how much water a person wastes in a day)
I pour morning coffee into Höganäs stoneware (coffee is never a waste of water) and duck through the sauna panelled bathroom adjoining the back porch, brushing past mosquito netting and last Winter’s withered wreath with its red berries pecked away by tits
On my phone I check and re-check the precipitation map, swipe spin refresh, watching the promising clouds break around the mountain and shrug off over the Baltic
A few months before leaving London Rebecka buys me a second-hand copy of, The original soundtrack to the film, Watership Down, familiar since childhood19
A black silhouette of a rabbit baring white teeth dominates the cover art. The foreground tangled thistle and sharp blades in subdued cyan-blue. The background a wan sunset overcast watery indigo to slate. To the left of the horizon, atop a grassy hill, a single steely-blue coniferous tree.
Unwritten submissions to indie art journals — an eerie naturalism that evokes the burnished sublime of Turner, the haunted moors of the Brontë sisters, the rural horror landscapes that span M.R. James to The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The cover art supporting the themes of the novel, the film, subverting the romantic myth of the pastoral as a site of bucolic sentiment. Capturing instead a marginal territory that is not so much idyllic as indifferent. Potentially outright hostile.
Hazy memories of tracking TV recorded VHS, interlaced rivers of blood, the psycho-pompic Black Rabbit of Inlé guiding the displaced warren through unsettled countryside
Rebecka telling me that for the Swedish release of the 1978 film the title was translated to, Den långa flykten
The Long Escape
Two months of wildfire warnings has quieted the machine crunch of scorpion harvesters, a too large patch of charred black miscanthus near the railway line, the future cracking the present
In the garden I try to ignore the bone dry water butts, bone dry IBC tanks, slowly replenishing piss puddle in the bottom of the well
Rebecka early harvesting stressed potato patches, lifting allium netting to check for signs of the newly arrived leaf miner fly, sticking fingers into the dust dry soil two trowels down
Come sunfall we’re swatting horse flies in-between gulps of box wine in the meadow, sitting on a bench of scrap wood sanded and hammered into two old stumps
We talk about the self-seeding yellow rattle20, the return of the six-spot burnet — a black stealth shaped moth with bright red wing spots — pollinating purple field scabious flowers
We talk less about the wheaty leaves on thirsty birches turning early, the accumulation of dehydrated patches of pasture, the brittle grasses bent double
We talk about nothing, watching dusk bloom the canopy of a tall forest oak recovered from a suffocating tomb of evergreens
Listening to the metal whine of a distant freight train and waiting for the sparks
‘Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens and ’Toadflax answered, That wasn’t why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.’21
but mor cess, and reeds, and hillocks, I write
what spell with vengeance a colossal blooming
body no room or spans, swards, swads, remnants
in sparks, Bluebell held every bough like appendages
bending oaks, bramble, scrub and blossom, swatting
black stealth fungus shaped by irritable fingertips,
slobber, slubber, spook of water, foul church
bogs bones, my magnolia rhododendron blistered
in pissing sways of idiopathic patina cut through
fermenting farmland, intimate time before we dart
downward into antibacterial pastures and marshy
low-lying ground, a petrified sunfall we’re appearing
in as sufferer mounds slump to whistling orchard
doorway, and withered thickets, and the infinite
conjuration of dewy skirts around monastic ruins
Steady rains pass the Equinox. Turning soggy firth and fold. Bent bunch-grass and windlestraw matt the wooded edges spared the scythe. Fae fog-drifts over lowlands.
‘Over centuries, as they turn up the earth, earthworms gradually bury Roman bathhouses, drystone walls, ancient edifices. […] Monoliths do not collapse, but are quietly, incrementally sunk.’22
August Strindberg’s 1901 painting, Inferno-Tavlan, adorning the cover of my bedside paperback copy of his Inferno Diary
A band of roughly daubed leaves coalesce into a shadowy enclosure over a stormy grey sky, pouring rain, a mottled landscape or seascape with sea-green hills or waves, swashes of vermeil red around the fringe
Encaverning a recurring obsession for Strindberg, the motif appearing first in his 1892 painting, Underlandet, depicting a pale light glowing maidens-blush amid a field of variegated deep greens and browns, scarce shell-pink flowers scattered above a darkening patch or pool
Strindberg’s attempt to paint the sea through the forest unintentionally rendered as a hollow opening onto a luminous realm of,
‘disembodied and undefined beings.’23
In the bedroom I drag my head out from under the duvet, my sleep interrupted by the insistent alarm call of small passerines — blue tits, crested tits, great tits, long-tailed tits, marsh tits, willow tits — tap tap tapping at the facade of the house
Rebecka shouting enthusiastically from the kitchen,
“Are you awake? Summer’s almost over!”
I reach blindly to the floor plunging my hand into a pocket of cold air up from the foundation
Only a few wood-boring beetle tracked timbers between me and the granite underlair of snakes and toads
06:33, your phone updated overnight, a single email notification,
‘Summer isn’t over deals inside!’
Mark as spam
‘I got up at 5 o’clock and saw the sun rise in a marvellous sky. A bright heart of light with a green rim fell on my bed three times.’24
I rise and eat Sinangag, a garlic fried rice dish popular in Singapore, I serve mine with two eggs from the local rekoring, one of the cracked shells a speckled white the other a watery blue
When we miss the rekoring and instead collect the eggs in person — arranged in crates alongside potatoes and root veggies in a refrigerated shack on the side of the road — me and Rebecka watch a half-dozen children racing bikes around a massive farmland followed by a bounding white shepherd
On the kitchen table — the smaller of our two 1950s Edsbyverken25 — I make room for my breakfast bowl and coffee mug by carefully moving the single toilet paper sheets speckled with dried tomato seeds with their heirloom names labelled in laddered biro
Brandywine Yellow, Canestrino di Lucca, Cherokee Purple
My wooden cottage chair creaks as my weight presses one of its back legs into a rattletrap floorboard that we’ll eventually have to fix, a groan from the pump and an iron orange spurt from the tap as the drought depleted well struggles to provide water through settled layers of minerals and sediments
In the underwood, leaning on a tumble-down cottage swimming in sunlight. Squashing bushy hassocks where the soggy water lies.
1894—1896, August Strindberg enters his self-mythologised ‘inferno crisis’,
‘I am in the wilderness. God has abandoned me. All the demons are let loose.’26
A description paraphrased by his biographer Michael Meyer as,
‘the wilderness years of self-torment’27
Growing increasingly paranoid, Strindberg spends this crisis period oppressed by weather as revelatory — apocalyptic — portent, believing sparks, static and thunder to be a direct manifestation of divine and demonic forces, his various chemical experiments to this end performed first in semi-seclusion in Paris in,
‘a miserable, unheated little room with a view of a dirty wall. A very simple iron bed in a sloping alcove, and in the middle of the floor a table piled high with papers, newspapers and various tools; on a marble fireplace several bottles lined up, and on the window a few small porcelain crucibles.’28
Before relocating to an isolated alchemical laboratory in an alpine forest in Austria, a landscape perceived by an hallucinatory Strindberg as corresponding to Emmanuel Swedenborg’s existential geographies,29
‘a valley of sulphur fumes, thundering sky, and fiery earth … the heavens opened, the clouds were blood-red — a sign against me.’30
I button up my long black rubber raincoat and step off the stone porch into bog, flosh, slash
I take cautious steps to the big falu barn to unplug the electric fence, erected as a temporary wild boar deterrent, humming softly around the outside of our partially collapsed stone border wall
The night of welcome lashings has broken to a heavy mist morning, the mountain washed clean, strung out to dry in the grey dawn
I pause in the barn doorway to listen to the trickling gutters, the splashing rain-butts, the occult rainfall31 coming down from the forest
On the ground inky pools on the surface as the water seeks purchase through the bedrock below
Two long strides at a time back to the porch, the garden sucking at muddied boots
Each step giving with a strain, a slup
‘It is then no acoustic hallucination from which I suffer; everywhere there are plots … the weather is terrible … electric wires even to my bed … attacked everywhere by electric currents which lift me from my chair…’32
Me and Rebecka sit at the living room table — the larger of our two 1950s Edsbyverken — in a pool of light from a green glass shoemakers lamp
We’re surrounded by unlit candles and waiting for the power to drop, our palms resting on the tabletop like the calm before a séance
Waiting for sprit raps, waiting for ectoplasmic materialisation
All the while pasted onto window panes wet lime and maple leaves — turning red turning gold — peeling in gusts
A plastic rain butt lid lifting and skipping over mulched potato patch, wedging itself between browning ivy-clad cherry boughs
A resounding crack announcing a fallen spruce
Front doors rattling in their frames
