Whispers of Deep Time: Reflections on Evolution and Nature
Wind whispers through the fossil record, carrying echoes of ancient lifeforms and primordial oceans. Soft, unbreakable creatures traverse the depths while desert floors tell stories of rolling processes and rain's wanderings. Between horizons of desert and grassland lie tales of early life and shorelines. The passing owl evokes memories in a wooded setting, and moles whisper beneath the surface of sunny lawns.
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Fossil Record Wind was stammering at the windows all night. If I slept at all it was a half-sleep filled with thoughts that halved into dreams and back again. The first cells divided identically, for millions of years. Millions of years before difference began. Slow learning life. Slower than stone. I would like a sleep as deep as those first fractal animals, colourless, rooted in the dark of empty oceans, carbon-paper thin. Everything in the wind says give me time, I can change: minerals in the rocks and streams; proteins in warm seas; memories; children who will remind us they never asked to be born.
Soft, Unbreakable Creatures Soft, unbreakable creatures travel the deep sea's stairways all night, all day, like Jaccottet's servant silence, clearing whatever speech has left (the smeared glasses and forks, the table's mulberry-ringed cloth) of the act itself, always in parenthesis, always between the surface of the sea and its buried woods that were the world once, its drowned
desert floors. The syntax of the rolling processes making more or less known; the mid-Atlantic waves that seem to surge tonight like thought through the trees. Simple rain, long before life, was the first impatient wanderer, leaving its small footprints, for a short time, everywhere.
Between The sprung horizons of desert and grassland eased them upright, complaining, the lolling tongues in their heavy skulls tasting the first granular nouns. They followed the shorelines, it seems white sands beneath the verbal tides, the darker shoals that seemed like depths but were rich, slick, harvest fields knowing better than to stray too far from the great simplicity of shallow seas. And in high, offshore winds, the bright scallops of reflected sun a cold simmering at the old affront of land. Middens of shell and fish-bone. A vast, mackerel sky of silver and grey; the high offshore wind where gulls might brace, and wheel.
Passing Owl, and the memory of owl, just after dusk in a wooded spot along the salmon fishers path on the banks of the Tweed. Mist was spilling into the world from the clinking shallows of the river. I think it was nothing more, that creature, than inches from the skull that cups my brain in place and offers it up to every passing thing: a glimpsed face as flat as the dial of a clock, the moon, the constellations.
Moles Their lives are a kind of whispering under sunny lawns, like the hurry of blood in the veins goes on under clothes, ceilings, conversations. Their mounds are neither towns nor ruins. Dead, their hands upturned are pink nerved and naked as our own. Tall trees frame the narrow gardens they mine. Night comes down. Thieves in dreams quarter their own homes. What if the blind frenzy of moles in the ground is the buried, lifelong panic it seems?
From the Lookout's Diary The weather comes from the empty west like carnival, on stilts of rain. I am happy in my simple, tall needle of attention, pointing one way, facing everywhere but down. I keep neat as a white laboratory rat; its pink clean fingers, warm palms. Tired of the wider place where every word is another's guest, I like this middle kingdom, this country of one. Whatever my instructions, commands, I have already forgotten them. * Hail, all day at the great walls of my windows, like thrown fistfuls of stones. I have finished the diary
of the lookout before me. The pick in his throat like a fishbone that was cancer all along, and swallowed him. Two bearers, gossiping, carried the body down the morning I arrived. It passed me on the spiral stair pitching like an empty canoe in their arms. * Spring. At last the thin air is warming. The bright brass handrail out of doors, plain and smooth as a wedding ring is singing in the wind again. From its shine the glassy latitudes curl their perfect zeros. Mornings, bent double over its slippery band, I try to read the pages of the seabirds' white shoulders wheeling below. I am too remote, too slow.
* Blue June. I am like a fly in a long-necked bottle in the sun. I remember how high summer moves stately and slow across cornfields, pasture, the wind- scrubbed hilltops at noon. Is it the delicate telescope, or what its sliding magician's cabinet reveals that eyes me when I lift it insect-like, tiny? * This much further from the core, this much
nearer the stars, the kettle is quick as a dog to its own whistle. All night, faint detonations of dry lightning over the skerries like the highlights of distant others at war, the world's volume turned low. It occurs to me suddenly that light from the furthest star has travelled equally far the other way. Perhaps to another tower. * This morning, a field mouse brained in the trap. Its fine long tail for balancing through how many thousands of generations on swaying ears of corn?
Winter soon. The herring fleets are gone, that shifted on the rim like ghost towns. The ocean painting itself again with wide brushes of storm. At night the blatant harvest moon and the constellations I never learned, though I think I recognise the twins, and the hunter's arrowless bow. Awake in my bunk I try to remember the words I knew for stones and water, or for the dreaming heavy-headed waves of grass beating at the tower door.
Not the Place but How the Place Was Found Travelling lost is one way to get there (not the place but how the place was found); falling and lying all night is another. The rooms that filled with snow, the quick black river I fished and followed underground; drowned bells in the loch at the heart of the moor. Two beetles I poured from a graveside jar were rowing to get there, round and round. I know this road but not the places. Where your house should stand is a foreign town. Travelling lost is one way to get here. Not the place but how the place was found.
