A comma butterfly settles head up on the trunk of a crabapple tree. We are on the turn: the harvest moon, a big brass lamp, rises through oaks above the Severn Gorge and lights the ghostly breath of mist caught in hazels arching over lanes; bats jink against the blue even-glow of a sky stretched taut as nylon and a hawkmoth purrs against your cheek; out in the stubble fields, before the ploughs return, there is a stillness that smells of sleeping horses.
In woods by the priory, tawny owls recite the most beautiful of old forest languages with an excitement not heard during laconic summer nights; leopard slugs the size of severed fingers draw silver roads through cut grass, and earthworms slip backwards under torchlight; a toad, badly injured, walks stiff-legged from an unseen trauma towards some dark place where it can retreat into the jewel inside its head. Put out of harm’s way, it was found later, flattened on the road, paying the harvest debt of John Barleycorn.
Mornings are nippy, washing over faces like stream water as mizzle slips from branches into the soil, leaving an ochre residue in the crowns of lime and birch, as if some great thing brushed against them as it passed through last night. Puffballs and ceps have bitten chunks missing like foam-rubber toys found under a hedge.
Gossamer tripwires of orb-weaver spiders glint as the sunlight enlivens, animates, shines the surfaces of stone and wood like shoes, magnetises insects to tremble with new powers; they – the wasps, bees, hoverflies and true flies – come flying in to rooms of light, chasing intoxications of fruit, nectar, pollen and unmentionable juices, in this the season to feed addictions, obsessions and enchantments.
There is a quickening of creativity in the air, a nation of the imagination, something bright as gold, loamy as humus, dark as shadow, free as fungal spores; these colours composed on the wings of a moment poised in a glimpse of being.
A comma butterfly settles head down on a crabapple tree. We have turned.
