42.

Yesterday after finishing my duties on the Echoing Green I made my way back through the Fairy Portals, a swampy neglected area we are gradually reclaiming from the tangled blackthorns. It borders the yard of our noisy neighbour & sometimes smells of his poisonous products, we still haven’t finished digging out the sheets of black plastic that lie buried for god-knows-what reason in the earth. In spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, the place already has a certain magic.

It was a brilliantly sunny morning but the portals themselves were in shade making the sparse dappled light look whiter & the shadows blacker. The contrast was beautiful & dazzling, especially where it picked out a frond of fern or caught in a cyclamen flower. I saw a blackbird disappearing beneath some straggly unkempt box bushes where a bright red azalea shone with the sun. Somehow it was as if the flowers I was seeing were the memories of those seen by him & by this feeling I knew that he had indeed seen & in his way appreciated them: it wasn’t just the wife & I who were enjoying the garden, even the apparently purely aesthetic aspects of it. I knelt down & looked at those flowers for a while, shining like red lightbulbs beneath an arch of sporulating fern. I could imagine the eyes of all the birds in our little world as a kind of midnight dew reflecting the vast depths of space & somehow condensing the stars into a tiny spark which kindled the vision of this garden, spreading out from the fairy portals like a kind of beautiful oil spill. Indeed as I trod the flooded path — little more than a channel dug in the mud — through a small portal of honeysuckle I watched the bacterial oil that collects in such places rippling with my slow sloshy footsteps, a kind of lubricated sky. Standing beneath the hawthorn in front of the small pond with its golden sunshine willow & ornamental quince was the silhouette of the rotten trunk I had erected, which over the years has become a place to make offerings: whenever I find the corpses of creatures (or accidentally produce them myself, such as the very occasional mouse I neglect to release from the until-then-humane traps) I bring them here & give them a sky burial inside the jagged woodloused towers of the trunk. Quite the range of little souls by now: electrocuted newts, hoof-trod toads, ejected baby sparrows, sleeping leverets, paused blackbirds, belly-up voles, mummified shrews. I made a crude & simple carving out of an interesting branch of pine I once found & it stands on top as a guardian. It reminds me a little of an old viking idol of Frey I once saw, although my carving is more modest, seeming to hide its sex by the merest turn of a leg. It used to have eyes but they fell out. What surprised & delighted me this day was the appearance of an owl pellet stuck somewhat precariously to one of the towers in such a way as to suddenly present itself to me when I had finished examining the effigy. It has been many years since I last saw an owl pellet, I was a child in fact. My grandad & I were such regular visitors to the local owl sanctuary that he was allowed to carry an extensible pincer pole that he would use to collect pellets from the cages. When we got home we would take them apart & examine all the tiny bones, taking particular delight in the skulls. One day I was swooped on by an Eagle Owl. Perhaps I got too close. Up on their stump they seemed more than my equal. It is less like a memory now than a dream, although I can still picture the cartoon my grandad drew of the event all I can feel from my own point of view is the spread of those great wings blotting everything out.