Description
‘The roaring alongside she takes for granted and that every so often the world is bound to shake’ wrote Elizabeth Bishop of the Sandpiper but she may as well have been writing about Slapton Ley.
Always on the verge of not being there at all and Zen sparse at this time of year, today I have just a few brief hours of sunshine in which to try and draw. This disappearing world of woods and water, coots and herring gulls shimmers and rustles before me. The stiller I sit – emptying my thoughts and waiting – the more it sparkles and shifts.
Against the optical grey of a now backlit France Woods, Goat Willows fan out, each of their fine dark lines offering up a last few perfect ovals of bronze. Opposite me the bark of a young sycamore is smooth and umber, the opposing symmetry of her buds as yet un-wrecked by salt and time. The parent tree to my right, chaotic & dark reaches out to a graceful Ash – the same grey green as the far woods I note – but darker. In her branches a robin, effortlessly singing the spaces between things. Glancing down at the open page in my lap, I despair at my pencil lines, pathetically tethered attempts to outline and describe. What am I doing here?
Out on the water, grebe sail through the mirrored afternoon sky. Hours pass and as my fumbling marks gradually cover the white possibilities of the page, the light retreats and the evening too lays out its dark pieces.
Just before dusk, the white raft of herring gulls mid-ley leave en masse. A moorhen picks her way through peat-dark shallows and a Cormorant slides out of the reed reflections below me to make hard work of the air – an eel in wingéd form, this black, Miltonian creature is a part of this paradise too.
The moon rises out over the sea and in a line of perfect tension simultaneously, very slowly sinks towards me.
