To inosculate

Posted on by kylienorman

This is how two trees come together as a verb:

The action of wind and weather rubs the

Trunking stems, wears down their hides of bark

Until, shedding the singular, they fix and engraft.

I saw two sycamores – their branches held aloft,

You’d almost think them paused in greeting –

With their bodies joined, creakingly growing.

They knew the trick to living long and well is sharing.

Different species of tree – ash and beech,

Oak and wych – have been known to husband like this:

Fused through lipless kiss. Forgetting separateness.

In this wound, where bark gives way to bark,

There is strength through scarring – a deep tissue spark

Uniting, healing, as if by magic, the other.

Each stripping, cleaving, peeling their barriers back.

Life is in the cracks. You scratch my back and

I’ll scratch yours. They’re stronger than either

Tree was growing singly. Combinedly, as ’twere

A lover’s knot, they forge a burl deadlocked.

When did rubbing become fixed embrace?

Was it a slow relenting over a hard winter once

When one tree, kissingly, cleft to its neighbour?

A mutual surrender to throw their lots in together.

Here they stand, intransigent, statued forever:

Old, wizened couple, leaning one on the other.

They are verbing together: always grafting, busily

working, co-mingling sap in the onrush of Spring –

Harvesting, growing into one another’s rings with age:

Unmoving, yet always sucking face.

This is how to make a craft of symbiosis.

In comparison with trees, a human kiss, so transitory –

A momentary rubbing of lips – is a post-it note

To the story written in a fixed, wooden kiss.

This verbing teaches me to strip my skin

And, rubbed raw of fear, let the light back in.

Inosculated sycamores beside the Muker hay meadows, Swaledale, Yorkshire

Bright broken things

Posted on by kylienorman

The lapwing’s call

Falls a bright broken bell

In the shell of my ear:

Moor-gleanings;

A Fossil of heartache

In a thin gather of rain.

Folding pain in its spooled-out

Skein of song. Lilting long

After the close of the cropped throat:

The whining note.

To all the trees

Posted on by kylienorman

To all the trees I’ve ever loved:

To the top-lofty pines in the Surbiton rec

Whose swaying called down fear like an incubus on my chest;

Whose sails the wind caught

And who smote me with the memory of the ’90s gale

When the wind had taken my five-year-old self for a tree

And uprooted and flown the branches of me,

Tethered by a hand to my heart-in-her-mouth minder.

O how the tree me flew, shook and quaked her leaves –

I looked askance at trees with that

Fear on my chest until – what – eight years?

Then I climbed (the youngest of four) –

Learning the limb-trick from sisters before –

All the lightning-blasted tree gods of Richmond Park.

I can still feel the smooth handholds of pale, barkless wood

As I hoisted into the Old Sycamore’s embrace at Petersham Gate;

Each branch’s worn depression had its function:

Here in a timbery nook a place for my teacup;

Here my fancied crown would go;

There a hollowed dip for my legs, just so.

Of the woods I was queen.

And in Bolton, Yorkshire, on holiday for a time,

I found another worthy trunking throne;

Its limbs stepped nicely for my climb

(I liked best to climb in secret and alone,

This vantage point to view the corduroy fields below);

To the tree which gave up a fine bow for my father

To bend and string for the Maid Marian in me;

To all the trees that were ever dens to embower me:

Where I scraped my knees and mudded school gingham dresses;

To the bone-tangling graveyard yews with their dark inky bark;

To the fierce, prickling hollies that smarted young fingers;

To my cathedral of horse chestnuts on Coach Lane, burning fiercely in autumn rains.

And you, my Spreader Oak, that I grow with now,

Cooking your acorn children on your boughs;

Older than me by several winters been and gone:

I would know you down to the heartwood bone.

Spread o’er me your speckled, scalloped leaves,

With their wasp-gall hangers-on,

So that I can breathe,

So that I can breathe.

Keep aloft the day

Posted on by kylienorman

Here the day is dusking to its close, and at its setting – as at a signal –

clouds of mayflies appear. The sun unlocks them from the water,

ripe, wriggling out of carapace – impatient to be together.

Now the time for surfacing and shedding selves; now for flight.

They are the gloaming’s lumineers – late this year –

now thickening the air in clouds of light; sluggish at first

to companion one another. No longer nymphs, but made other.

Ambition lifts them high, helicoptering the sky; tails beating, mating.

They are flinching light. In their propellered flight

there is struggle and fight – the will for life.

I recognise this catching fire:

they dance of furious desire – to live and multiply and stay.

Birthing at the close; lasting no more than a day.

The sun that conjured them slowly sinks out of sight, lengthening shadows.

Dashing themselves against the last of its light, the mayflies

are at their most ephemerally bright. For one perfectly suspended golden hour,

they hold the night at bay, and keep aloft the day.

Cabinet of Curiosities 1

Posted on by kylienorman

Starlings murmur out of cover

breath made visible on the air;

Stutter, recover, fetch, inflect

the sky with your feint-jive.

Dive as one without a leader,

above me conjuring song to prayer;

rippling swarm fleeing stillness,

fluid in the nighting air.

Night Sky

Posted on by kylienorman

Stars do indeed twinkle, I have seen them:
pricked into the blue canvas of the sky,
a flicker of pearl pulsing on the eye
out of the deep velvet dark –
winkingly –
with each its own lustre of light.
The rite of dusk so many nights
unobserved under cityscape smudges
is here piercingly clear –
on the wild of the moorland,
in thick country darknesses.
I fiercely wonder at your brilliance –
and try to claim your light –
eyes full wide
focusing the night.
But I do not know you – you,
light years beyond my ken,
hanging like a symbol or a metaphor
above my head.
You’re dead above me,
your light the last dying glimmer
of your living glamour.
I only know you in your
death throes
so far removed
from the everyday.
O let me look at you this way –
dying beautifully,
eternally,
where I am not known.

The owl’s cry is a tremor
of my wonder,
and voices it better.

When bees dance

Posted on by kylienorman

In drowses of movement, in winged occlusions, bees dance;
their wings sound furies, their humming never single but
joined in buzzed harmonies; tiny fidgeting fledgling beings
trimmed in flower dust and seed: carriers of living things;
carriers on the wind, nectar-drunk and plenty-eyed,
busy about the honey-glide. Wish I had enough eye to see
and ear to hear the single hymn each sends through hive:
shopping lists of which nectar’s choice and where
the yellow dust pollen waits in sufficiencies.
I wonder do they dance of my garden and of me,
of the honeysuckle and the bells of the penstemon,
these soft-furred, furious things? A heartbeat in one;
a squeeze against the breastbone drawing on in drones;
sometimes still in secret strokings of antennae –
a sociable etiquette, wiping pollen from oval eyes;
more often a ritual vibration gives tongue to the hive nation.
A colloquy on the wing – mapping terrain since first
spring – claiming each flower between. The dance begins
on the landing board in feints; a single split from the whole,
stirs itself up, sloughing subtlety – all uppity – no longer
moving in general mass, but individuated articulated
energy. Perhaps it is ordered, orderly frenzy, but to me
it seems bee anarchy: dense, tense clenches of sound;
all wound up, and I batten down my body hatches at the
approaching buzz-flights, tightly wound as a spring
myself; bearing the agglomerated sound as long as I can.
Later, I still hear still feel the ghosts of their wings;
and visions of bees dancing entrance my dreams.

© Bracken Hall Wildlife & Countryside Centre, Glen Road, Shipley

In amongst the clover

Posted on by kylienorman

Their white flowers offer
their lips to bee lovers
as they hover and linger
over a drop of nectar,
that is possibly sweeter
than anything – far better –
than I might taste, ever.
Whitely they bob like a
lay of snow over the
green in thick blessings or
a dying surrender at
close of an afternoon’s
long, tender while.
Trembling smiles
on the green near that
tree, but not under.
I watched the mower
cut down the clover
as though it were nothing,
just tidying the green.
For every clover that’s been
I mourn a little. Dreams,
spun from days of growing,
return fresher, quicker;
irrepressibly sweeter,
and here for the summer;
with rain to get plumper,
and lusher and bee-stung;
blushing beneath a sun
that beams adorations
on white-globe plantations.
I was never so happy as
when walking through clover,
a disciple of summer,
catching eye-fulls of bee-fur
on a blisteringly hot day.

Walking with my Father

Posted on by kylienorman

My father’s strides are twice the strides of mine;
bee-blinded and spore-gathered, I drag the path behind,
lingering by the dry stone wall a time
to see lapwings, fluff-fringed, give chase with their cries.
He makes space for my whimsies, as though delay
at vetchlings and foxgloves and other outdoor loves
were not a pain and he’d not rather be going
to lay the path ahead, to seek a stile,
and leave the tussocks, bogs and ditch behind.
The way is long, he’s things to do, but this too is true:
he lets me amble slow to know a place,
while striding on and covering twice the space.

Patiently, he waits my searches out,
calling advice on where to step and not.
In spite of warnings I am mud-slicked, got
with grasses, seed-muddled, moth-tickled, hot.
He keeps a gracious silence on my dirt;
he’s seen me bramble bruised and hurt
in childhood trees at childhood games when young,
knee-high to a sapling, unformed, unbegun
to life and death and future happenings.
His hands have swung me high up into trees;
and round in circles. Now, older, his hand’s squeeze,
in the fields’ up-and-overs, says ‘if you need.’

Together but separate, like moon and planet,
each walking our own particular gait. Always though,
when got ahead, he waits with half a knowing smile,
drawing a bead on the horizon mile until,
fresh with meadow daisies, speedwell, sorrel,
and weathered with smiles of green dreams –
of black moths and bullocks one week new,
and full of my discoveries and spring-caught cheer,
I at last appear; never so slow that he’d leave me behind,
even if he’s fly-swarmed and over-sun-warmed waiting.
My father strides with steps twice-large as mine,
along the path that I’ll eventually find.