It is late May's intoxicating drizzle, misty green & you're just walking back & forth, sometimes playing the flute or engaging in conversation with a dusky winged fly
Not quite alone in allotment town, you wanted to check up on the squashes & beans & found those mysterious paw prints in the plot that they've been talking about
The walking gets slower & slower & silence descends, a noisy silence of rain drum & bird song & the spicy weed shout of soil minerals released into the air
The sky, grey, lightening & darkening itself in time with the earth's gentle breaths & the crow returns to her nest on the top of the electricity pylon over there
The fallen ash log has a gravity of path distance, the walk gets even slower, to that “nothing but meditation lies ahead,” Zen-Zeno speed, like a surprise
The silent power of sitting down, all alone, on the land: its silence is music, its music is silence, its heaviness is light, its light is a heavyweight circle
Letting go of the centre, the horizon rushes away like the end of an unexpected dream-moment: you awaken when you didn't even know that you were asleep
The wren meets your gaze - her resolute eye meets yours before she dives into the dark lightning-folds of the ivy at the base of the hedge
Your passion is a roaring green flame that lances up into the sky like a new bramble leaf that just crossed the threshold, unstoppable in growth-might's call
You'd shudder, but you're a mountain-height of tendril nerve constellations, entwined around the flowering presence of the cerebro-spinal rod
You say the word, make the unspeakable sound that confirms the lack of an echo, a face reflected in a puddle, a daytime half-moon face turned toward the sun
The wren meets your gaze – beyond any idea of speculation or offering of your self, her self, acting out the non-story that completes the circuit
& you bow & bury your face into the sweet earth breathing deeply into crushed ground elder & soil crumbs left behind at the end of the ice-age
Curled like an embryo in a bird's egg, like a soon-to-be-seen in some secret seed, like a vowel in a word, like an eye in a bird's head, like a man in a garden in the spring.

Barry Patterson, June 2008