Blood on the Snow - Nel's Story

Blood on the Snow

 “Every seven steps I will let fall a drop of red blood and a white feather. These will show you the way, and if you follow this trail you can redeem me”. 

The Brothers Grimm

 

 

Nel

In February 2005 I fostered one of the most traumatised border collies that the Dog Rescue Centre had ever seen. I was advised to foster rather than adopt because of her severe problems.

I went to collect Nel, as I had then named her, late afternoon and it was getting dark when I brought her back to the forest. At the cottage, when I opened the car door, she ran off into the forest. I searched for her for two hours before calling up the centre for advice. I was told that it was futile to search any longer and that I should put her bed and food outside ,which I did - under the lean- to where the logs are stored. I did this for two nights and searched for her each day, to no avail. She came for the food and to sleep but I never saw her. She ran off as soon as I moved inside the cottage in the morning.

Then on the third day I woke early to find it had snowed. I knew I might now have a chance of tracing her tracks. When I got outside, with a stroke of amazing luck, I saw that she had nicked one of her paws and had left a trail of spots of blood. I followed this trail for a quarter of a mile and saw that she had found the corrugated tin den in a hidden part of the forest, made by the young sons of our neighbour. When I crept up to the entrance she ran off through a gap in the back of the den. While she was gone I filled up the gap and then waited some distance off behind one of the pine trees. Half an hour later she came back. This time I went into the den and saw that she had made a bed of bracken. There was no escape for her and I cried with the pity of it all – that she had been so abused in the first place.

I made my pact with her then. I would adopt her. I told her that no one would love her more than I would and that I would keep faith with her however difficult times might get. And they were tough. I had had border collies for over forty years but this one literally brought me to my knees.

She was completely shut down, wouldn’t lift her head, give eye contact, wag her tail or make any sound. She was terrified of noise, sudden movements, flapping clothes, and any time I reached down to pick up anything, she dropped into a defensive position. People told me she must be brain damaged.

It was six weeks before she came out from a corner of the room and months before she lifted her head, wagged her tail and made her first bark. I spent hours on the mountain practising recall on a long rope. When I let her off the lead in the forest she ran off if we encountered anyone else. Wherever we went she was on constant high alert and would do anything to avoid people, including scrambling up cliff faces and burrowing into thorny bushes.

Who knows what cruelty and neglect she endured that first year of her life. Whatever I taught her, she taught me much more - about patience and compassion. She is a wild but gentle spirit, and still, eight years later, she will not approach any human she does not know.

I don’t fully understand the immediate bond I felt with Nel. The woman at the rescue centre told me that despite what we think, the dog picks us. I'm glad she chose me.

I wrote this poem during those early days.

 
Brushing Nel

Holding fear from a past life,
you perceive each raised hand
a potential threat.

I show you comb and brush,
lay them as offerings at your feet
in ritual before we start.

Hand on the soft silk of your head,
I chant to the mad gong
of your beating heart.

Count the blessings of each stroke.
Fine hairs rise like incense smoke,
trust opening as a lotus.

Your tail a flap of prayer flags,
my heart a singing bowl.

Nel on Moel Siabod

 

Nel and our shadows



A Found Poem

Galway Kinnell

I am no cook so rather than write about the best meal I've ever made I decided to post a poem I wrote in response to "Oatmeal" by Galway Kinnell. It is partly a Found Poem in that I have used excerpts from other writers.

 

I ate porridge for breakfast.

I made it on the stove
in the French cast iron saucepan.
I made it as I like it,
so thick the spoon stood up,
and sweetened with agave nectar.
I thought of a poet
not to have breakfast with -
Sylvia Plath -
(not after nearly three hours
of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” last night).
I think she would
take her porridge “as a morsel, cold".
And those scolding vowels
setting my nervous dog on edge –
“You do not do, you do not do…”
If  I’ve learned
anything from the black rook
in rainy weather, it is to
“let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
without ceremony, or portent.”
Tonight I will make the seven leeks
pulled from the ground this morning,
(roots glistening silver) into a pie
and invite Mary Oliver to dinner.

Quotations used are from "Antony and Cleopatra" - Shakespeare and "Daddy" and "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" - Sylvia Plath

Found Poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original.

Ten Blue Threads

Drypoint Print by Linda Davies

Towards the end of July, and five days away from my flight to NYC, I was visiting South Wales, and on the journey down, asked my partner to wait for me in the car park at the bottom of the route up to Pen y Fan while I did a run up and down the mountain. My mother’s ashes are scattered there as she loved the mountain too, and we had walked it together a few times.

It was a drizzly late afternoon and visibility was poor. As I ascended, I passed a steady stream of walkers on their way down and when I got to the summit I was alone. I only stayed on the top long enough to write a massage to my mother on one of the pieces of slate around the cairn as it was cold and the light was poor.

On the way down, my toe clipped one of the huge, uneven stone slabs, and with the combination of momentum and gradient I went hurtling up into the air. I remember in those seconds before I hit the ground, thinking, This is going to seriously hurt.

Strangely enough I don’t remember feeling any pain on impact. I do remember the immediate need I felt to assess my condition. The most visible injury was a gaping wound just below the knee cap on my left leg. I could see the white of the bone or tendon and watched with some detachment as my blood flowed onto the red earth.

I have a strong memory of lying almost at one with the mountain and thinking that if this is where things ended for me, I could surrender. I also thought that if there was any chance I could get up then I would find a way back down the mountain.

I managed to get up and knew that I had to find a way of staunching the blood. I took off my rain jacket and vest and, pulling the two pieces of flesh tightly together, used the vest as a tourniquet. Then I hobbled the final mile down the mountain.

Later in Accident and Emergency the doctor took two and a half hours to clean the wound and to sew it together with ten stitches. We talked about many things, including mountain running, meditation and travel. I told him about my forthcoming trip to NYC and he looked doubtful.

“We have to check you out for possible infection and the stitches will need to be removed in ten days”, he said.

When he had finished the job he opened a drawer and took out two scalpel blades. “Pack them in your hold luggage”, he told me.

Ten days later and thirty seven floors up in an apartment overlooking the East River and Queensboro Bridge, my partner removed the stitches, placing each blue thread in the palm of my hand.

New York Pavement - photograph

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” E M Forster

I live in Parc Bothy in the forest at Coed Hafod y Llyn. It is an old cottage and very compact but in an extremely peaceful and beautiful setting with a view out over  Moelwyn Fach. The Blaenau Ffestiniog steam train runs along the track which is about fifty yards downhill from the cottage. The smoke and the whistle of this train are integral to life here.

There is a small studio attached to the cottage and it’s in here that I like to write. I like it at dawn when I can see the sky lightening and watch the two large crows that always arrive early in search of the scraps of food that I leave for them on the shed roof. And I like it at dusk when the light gradually fades and the moths gather on the window panes.

The Sketchbook Project - "Milltir Sgwar / Square Mile"

“It's like a road trip, but with sketchbooks”.

 “The Sketchbook Project is a global, crowd-sourced art project where participants from all walks of life are sent a sketchbook … fill the pages and return it for inclusion in a traveling exhibition and permanent collection at The Brooklyn Art Library. Anyone – from anywhere in the world – can participate in the project."

During my annual visit to New York, I visited the Brooklyn Art Library in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There I signed up to participate in their 2012 Sketchbook Project. You get a Moleskin sketchbook 5”x7”, and are then invited to respond to one of their many themes in any way you chose, regarding technique and materials. You can deconstruct and reconstruct the book if you wish but it must be returned the same height to fit their shelves. The term Sketchbook can indeed be interpreted very loosely and can be in any medium suitable to your own way of working .You also have the option to digitize your book which then becomes an online companion to the one in The Brooklyn Art Library.

I chose to work on the project with Welsh artist and printmaker, Linda Davies. Living in the forest as I do, one of their given themes seemed very fitting, and we decided on “A Path Through The Trees” as our working title.

As writer and artist, we have both previously incorporated the concept of Milltir Sgwar into our work.

“Milltir Sgwar/ Square Mile”is a phrase much used in Welsh to define your patch of land, the place that created you, the location that tugs your heartstrings when hiraeth – another uniquely Welsh concept for  a yearning that is tied to a particular place - kicks in.”

Although not the place of my birth, my deep connection with the forest, inspired me to focus on this immediate environment.

During the autumn of 2011, the forest I live in had undergone a massive harvesting programme which dramatically altered my close surroundings. With all of the pines cut down the aspect was opened up and light was let in but something impenetrable and mysterious was lost. I had to learn to live with a changed landscape, to reconcile myself to lost and altered paths. We set out to record and respond to these changes.

Book One – “A Path Through The Trees I"
 – was for the 2012 touring exhibition.
Work on Book One began with me taking a notebook when I ran in the forest to record my observations and emotional responses. Then Linda went walking with her camera and the words I had written, and recorded her own images, choosing those that best worked with my words. Images and words were collated and printed by hand using the paper lithography technique.Text was added through xerox transfer. The original sketchbook paper was removed and the book re-created with Somerset newsprint 300gram paper inserted into the original Moleskin cover. The cover was also printed on.

Book Two – “A Path Through The Trees II”
– was for the 2012 The Limited Edition Book Series 
“Every contributor to the Sketchbook Project Limited Edition Vol. 1 will be included in a series of art books documenting the project. Together, the series will provide insight into the imagination and process of each artist participating in the project. Bound by the Brooklyn Art Library Press and hand-finished in our Brooklyn workshop, the book series will be published in the fall of 2012”.
Book Two was a companion book to Book One, but this time Linda selected a range of photographs and I responded with words. Both books had a red elastic band around them lengthways. My post, often bound by a red elastic band, is delivered to a box attached to a tree and we often found these red bands during our field trips.

The format for both the books was a concertina artist's book to give a narrative to image and text.

Selected words and images

Book One

Unknown paths
taught me to be patient
and call lost by another name

Touch the gnarled bark
and think of everyone
you’ve ever loved

There is a peace amongst trees
that have lost all green
and are reconciled

Book Two

I cannot tell
if the fallen branch
feels less betrayed
than the felled

Cedar heart
with rippled
growth rings
your lifelines
rooted to cold earth

I look for you

in the runes
of scarred bark
the scattered leaves
my oracle

http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject2012

Goldengrove Unleaving...life in the forest





Walking home through the forest again yesterday, I felt ambivalent about the beauty of the fallen leaves. I thought of this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

 Spring and Fall

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

  

 

Long Pale Corridors

I have just picked up a message left earlier today by a very close friend. She tells me that her father died yesterday. There is so much sorrow in her voice, heart and soul saturated with sadness. Her mother died some years ago and, like me, she has no siblings. The burden of loss is all hers.

My mother died in 1996. I stayed with her for the last three days as she faded away.  It was a wrenching loss. My world literally tipped up on its axis and I lost my balance. My father died in 1997. This often happens. One partner dies and the other dies soon after.

I had strange thoughts. It felt disloyal to be still in the world when they had both left it. They were unconditional in their love. They were my points of reference.

An anthology of poems about bereavement out at the time was called “The Long Pale Corridor”. This felt such an apt title. I found my grief exhausting and isolating. I needed to read and re-read poems like this one by Tony Harrison. They didn’t make me more sad; they were a comfort and company on the journey

Long Distance ii

Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.
He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

 I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name

and the disconnected number I still call.

 So the prompt for today is “Right now, what would I change about my life?” Easy.  I would like my parents back.