“Freeze Thaw”
Sunday 10 Aug 2008
Midsummer, an oak-leafed ripple extends through crisp water.
Fed by glacier melt, the stream cuts through low scrub and long grass descending from the twin-peaked mountain of my parents.
The shimmer clears, refracting sunlight upon a fist of granite, submerged. It knocks quietly against another, a small plume of sand.
The current shifts and a fish back breaks the surface. Calm here, there are rapids and falls to come.
Beached on meandering banks far below are pebbles, origin unclear; their fractured tessellation worn smooth in sacrifice to irresistible turbulence.
Break one open, in the heart the mineral veins match true.
“Don’t Look Back”
Saturday 12 Jan 2008
Sweat blurs his vision, canyoning into rusty eyes every time his breath grows unmanagably tight under his pounding chest and he simply has to stop, heaving, desperately grasping to remain upright.
They must be far behind, he must have five minutes.
It’s not enough and he knows it.
With each pause, each blessed influx of cold night air, his scent patch grows and hangs enticingly on the breeze. A waypoint, a giant fucking arrow pointing directly towards him.
What else can he do?
Stop?
Fight?
These things dont fight, they consume. They feed.
A rooftop clatters in the distance.
Run!
Notebooks and ink
Sunday 30 Dec 2007
I’ve been scribbling the past few days, getting out to a public place, people busying around, and simply sitting down with a pen and tiny notebook, jotting down very short stories and haiku.
I’m happy with the five published here so far and have some more in the wings which need polishing. The one hundred word drabble limit is an interesting target and constraint in quite a similar way to haiku. Word choice is paramount, purposely choosing the right concise sequence to translate an idea, set a scene – yet I’ve had fun playing with meter and word structure, especially on Vanishing Point.
Time now too for deciding the annual aural list of my year’s favourite music…
***
Oh, have a haiku:
“An Hour Beneath Curved British Sky”
Percussive plate crash.
Two hundred murmuring thoughts.
My pen, my book, me.
“Vanishing Point”
Saturday 29 Dec 2007
Darkness.
The stone is the size of your fist.
Or a little bigger.
The size of your heart.
It is granite.
Hard.
Tumbling.
It falls slower than a man.
And many have fallen.
Men.
All hoping to pass.
This is a dangerous place.
Black ink of precipice swathed in fear.
And stones.
Scattered and scrabbled aside.
In frantic fighting for position and purchase.
Still tumbling.
Alone.
Unseen.
Mute.
Sudden impact on a scant outcrop.
A whipcrack bellows upwards.
A plummeting scream.
The dust will rain down slower.
Unswept bones below.
Lean out now, listen carefully. You will hear it land.
“A Winter Walk”
Friday 28 Dec 2007
Newly fallen twigs, naked and dried by the chill winter air, snap sharply underfoot into the cool damp sod beneath. A clear trickle of water has carried stones to a quiet meander of the stream. Pine leaves rustle as two rooks caw and flutter south-west toward the late afternoon sun, burning orange on ebony.
These are the waiting days. The end days. Solstice passed, awaiting Gregorian transition, the year’s punctuation in slow ellipsis.
Crunch of gravel, an echoing dog bark, a branch falls.
“This is my tradition.” He says, and takes her hand
as they set off along the path.
