The Ghost in the Contours
I imagine the ghost of the goddess standing amidst
the saplings and trees, the wraith of a tribe’s minor deity,
hidden behind leaves, fronded, friendless,
a nutter in the shrubbery, waiting.
There she stands, solitary on the heath, though lights
from the adjacent bungalow window the night
and the man at one hundred and fourteen calls
his dog in from the rain, that streams in rivulets
as feet embed and root, legs and torso turn
to trunk and heartwood, arms to branches,
hair to leaves, foliage of the goddess-tree.
The geology chart shows the materials of different strata
as pink and lime, ochre and gold: a dance of colour like Kali.
One November morning I rose early, just before dawn,
as the pale twilight began to lift the landscape from its dark.
I trod the gentle pathways through the green, heard patterings
and scamperings, earth scratches, tree flutters, the paper taps
of leaf fall. Towards the earthworks of the butterfly reserve,
I stopped to remove my shoes and stood barefoot on the cool
soft, spongey clods, grasses feathery beneath my toes.
Below me swam those colours of geology,
and like some being Medusa cursed I found
myself at one with stone, with chalk and mudstone,
weald clay and ironstone, and sand and silt
and grit. Here, I became the pedestal
of my own effigy, embedded in the lie of land.
The contours lap across the landscape like a gentle sea
and with the Ordnance Survey 3D browser, you can tilt
the map to gain a bird’s eye view from any height, and see
just how small is this stretch of unkempt green, that yet
preserves something of the wild, the ancient and the free.‘To apprehend things — walking on a hill, seeing the light change, the mist, the dark being aware, using the whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit [...] it dissolves one’s being. I am no longer myself but part of a life beyond myself.’
Nan Shepherd, quoted by Charlotte Prodger in Bridgit
