location. Not done in a flat field. Or full view
of roads. To be cold. The tufted frosted
clumps of winter grass to have been
less regularly topped. Where spent ragwort
stubbornly and bronze bracken, desiccate
stalks mostly, litter and untidy. Where
fallen skew old fences trail
ragged tripwires. Untidy yes, but
not full wild. Allow
one pioneer sitka poking
on its nerves on gone farmland.
practice. Need an odd-shaped piece of ice. Kidney
or ear. Held up to the light. Hold it: see that
the thin winter sun picks out the ice’s
incipient fern and broken bar-ingot
emergent. The ice in hand
to be a lens; as it melts it will concentrate,
distort and reverse, and the dark band,
the trees, will lift eccentric
and exact, miniaturised along the now
flint-flaked edge, strict
against the sky where birdcalls carry.
voice. To be amphitheatric only
in the shape the throat and mouth make
calling across a deep water-filled
quarry, the possibility of yourself.