Up the back on a calm moonless night
Have you noticed the little tremors that sometimes jiggle under your feet as you walk across the open fell in darkness? I don’t think we are imagining them. I think that they are the skin of the night quivering, trying to shake us off like little bugs which tickle her. If you watch the flank of a deer being pestered by flies you will recognise that same shivering riddance. The skin of the night is very sensitive, despite her vastness, despite the many scars she bears from motorways and street lights. We must be gentle with her skin.
Black Hare - Karl Blossfeldt
Her hearing is profound, misses nothing. Here in the western dales she manifests the ears of a hare. With movements more fluid than a human wrist allows, the cupped hands of her lepus ears swivel and tilt as they dissect the darkness for a grain of movement, sifting through the empty warehouse of silence for the sound of a fox exhaling, filtering a whole ocean of hush to find only the sound of a vole chewing a seed.
The night’s ears are vulnerable, too easily damaged to withstand the hubbub of day. Any clank of metal, a clumsy step or the opening of a door, and she instantly folds them away, flat down her back. The sound of our words, spoken in the darkness, are a particular brutality to her – please, let’s not say them out loud.
For all her delicacy the night is rarely alone. She has her favourites. The horseshoe bat has always been welcome at her court, face like a battered rose but witty and well-informed. The badger, bluff and dependable. The polecat with his clown’s make-up hiding stiletto teeth. She has the Great Bear and the Dog Star to carry her insignia. Though nobody understood what she saw in him, she once took a blunt-headed comet as a lover. The Tawny Owls are the offspring of the union. So we must be thankful for her occasional indiscretions.
She rarely bothers to open her eyes. Sight, the judge and jury of the daylight hours, is a trickster after sundown. For the night, it is her nose which fills the few gaps which hearing has left unpainted. By smell alone she can follow the stoat through his labyrinth, footfall by footfall, even though he went to ground an hour ago. The slightest breeze is a watercolour of leaf mould, rabbit piss, otter spraint. Hedgehog is spicy, eel smells of sex in the grass. The scent-shades of life and death and decay are rich and long since in harmony. Mine is the only smell which offends her, uninvited as I am, out here in the black velvet lands where I have no business, no grace, no senses worth the name.
She has her footmen trip me up and laugh when I fall. They steal my hat and place it high, unseeable on a hawthorn branch. For now I must accept that I am not fit for this place, not worthy of being in her presence. To one day go unnoticed and ignored is the high honour I hope for. I’ll study hard to reach it.
Gosh how lovely. I love your quiet humility and sensitivity. So rare, so rare, so rare. The image of the night taking a lover and producing offspring is sublime. You bring the natural world to life in a way I’ve not read before. Thank you.
So much grace here. You’ve pushed away the pedantic shroud by twining your knowledge and observation with poetry, with a peek into how you sort your pantry of collected images and animal behaviors and senses. Yours is a delightfully informed imagination, one I would take a walk along side of in an instant. Your words seem to hit the “paper” like watercolor pigment, stretching across the fibers to make unexpected color, allowing a kind of resonance of experience with the reader, me. I like your deep, rich brevity. It is just enough to fill me up and delight. Thanks for putting your writing out into the world!