Mapping the Woods by Rebecca Hurst
PN Review 244, November - December 2018.
‘… woods are evidently places propitious for wandering,
or getting lost in, all woods are a sort of labyrinth.’
— Francis Ponge, The Notebook of the Pine Woods
Parson’s Wood, Mayfield, East Sussex
Longitude: 51.061001; Latitude: 0.308827
I. Winter solstice
(21 December 2009
sunrise: 08.00 am
sunset: 03.54 pm)
Between dark and dusk
we walk to the brink of the year,
an iron-red line on cinereous clay.
Hands cramp with cold on the old road
as we sketch and note this half-hour
past sunrise but not brightening
though the rooks are awake and jigging
on the frosted shoulders of a broad oak.
Pass a nip of brandy, roll another smoke.
Make a mark
and a mark on the damp page.
This winter’s day the wood is a room,
screened by snow, shuttered and barred,
nothing doing.
Yes, we feel the Parson’s coppiced acres,
feel the challeybeate and charcoal in our bones.
Three walkers, we beat the bounds,
talking of other pilgrimages:
the vixen’s path
the vole’s path
the roebuck’s.
From the knap of this hill the wood
is perspicuous. It holds a pose:
the line of golden larches, the net
of branches the beech casts to the sky.
Count the ways in:
the tracks and driftways,
sheere-ways and stiles,
the bostals and tripets,
gaps, twittens and stiles.
Loop round and back again.
These Wealden hills burn us up –
the effort of taking them in the snow.
Fumbling in pockets for a pencil stub
I trace the shape of a chestnut bole,
a rosette of reindeer moss.
The doctor’s lanky son peers down,
says, ‘Cla-cla-donia rangiferina,’
and harrups to clear his throat.
Rolls another smoke.
Siân hands out gold chocolate coins,
blows her cold-pinked nose.
By the hammer pond we peer
through the burne-washed brick tunnel.
The water races, black as slate.
Three centuries back there was a foundry
here: a pond bay, trough and furnace.
We light a cardboard waterwheel.
It doubles, spins and crackles.
The old year creaks, then turns
as with a flash the flames ignite
quick as the robin flits
across the ice-fringed pool.
Night comes early.
We set a candle in the window.
There is stew in the oven,
wine and bread and salt on the table.
Johnny draws back the curtains
and St George ambles
through the unlocked door.
We cheer as he slays the Turk
with his righteous sword,
cheer again when the dead
man is magicked back to life.
Walking home through the wood
an hour past midnight
I find a chestnut leaf
lying on the path,
fallen
picked up
then palmed
between the pages of this notebook.
II. Spring equinox
(20 March 2010
sunrise: 06.03 am
sunset: 06.10 pm)
Sugar moon, stiff hands flexing.
Station Street to High Street
down Fletching Street to Coggin’s Mill.
The air is tepid and thick,
mist draws down along
the sandstone ridge.
Traffic reporting from the A26.
Birdsong quadraphonic;
simulcasting spring.
I feel it too.
Yawn, warming
as I walk, and
my body yields.
At Johnny’s house a bedroom window
is propped open. We shout in the dark,
‘Wake up lapsy!’ and a lean shadow
calls, ‘Good morning! Be right down.’
We take a thermos of tea, fill our pockets
with Simnel cake and tie our bootlaces tight.
6.04 am. A minute past the day’s dawning
but no sun. Just grey cloud and the clatter
of the burne, rain-choked and precipitate.
We circle the rough-sketched
woodland, walking in silence.
Downstream from the hammer pond
we paddle along a reach of gravel.
Above us the bank rises ten feet sheer.
We dig in the clay for nuggets
of charcoal, slag and ore,
grubbing out a lump of iron
big as my head. It is cast
with foliage, a dainty kissing ball
made of lion’s mouth, celandine,
hemlock and stitchwort.
Later we sit in a row on a gate
and Johnny tells a story
he heard from Alf Clout –
‘There was a white bullock
round as the moon
who broke a fence
and lost himself deep
in this tangled thicket.
He dwells here still,
and each year in March
there’s one who will see him.
And they’re in for a hard year,
poor soul, for a glimpse
of the white stot bodes ill.’
We nod, make note and eat our sandwiches.
Twelve hours pass in doing
not much
but walking and watching the shift
in shade and tone on this sunless day.
We wash our hands and drink from the spring,
tie three-dozen ribbons to the ash tree
that sprouts nearby –
a wish for every bright strip of cloth
binding us close to this crooked place.
The flat light drains colour from the fields,
submerges the intricacies of the wood
and exhausts the gaze. Nightfall
revives the faded landscape
just as it begins to rain
and we see the gleaming bones
of a long-dead oak and the bronze
and mauve of budding trees.
Still walking, homeward now, heads down
against the rain, ready to see this bout through,
we cover the conifer plantation
make our last lap along the Little Rother.
Mud licks our boots. We walk blind
night-fallen, surefooted. Until
the path dips and there is a flurry
like a leaf turning in the breeze.
Siân stops.
Peers down.
‘A toad’, she calls out in warning
and summoning
for then there is a frog and a frog
and another toad
and five, six, seven more
leaping up from beneath our feet
green and gold on grey.
We walk single file
heads bowed
and counting our steps
with care
on this most lively road
through the woods
knowing
they’ve woken to warmth and dark
and wriggled from their muddy holes
to mate in the puddles and ponds
where they were spawned.
We hear them crooning now
for this damp gloaming
is their unimaginable high noon
and the wet
and the warmth
and the woods
have called
and they have come.
III. Summer solstice
(21 June 2010
sunrise: 04.44 am
sunset: 09.17 pm)
Milk thistle is the solitary maid
settling her spindle in the coppice
amongst the chestnut boles
and bee-fingered foxgloves.
The stream is silent, stretching
itself from blue sunrise to last light,
seventeen hours long. No rush then.
And the leaf canopy is a bold new green,
while fireweed and knapweed,
ragwort and buttercup scald
the fields and verges and tracts
of common ground.
We follow a fox-track flush
with orchids and milk-maids,
make tea from pods of Solomon’s seal,
inhale the rare steam and lie about
in the long grass waiting
and reading aloud.
Johnny unpacks the picnic:
bread, cheese, tomatoes
red as my sun-flushed face,
Milton’s Comus,
a dish of watercress,
another of strawberries.
Taking off his shirt and tilting his hat,
the doctor’s son begins to read:
The first Scene discovers a wild wood.
The ATTENDANT SPIRIT descends or enters.
Afternoon dozing –
I dream of a woman
sitting with her lap full
of some puzzle of yarn.
She wears green and gold
and is all pins and needles,
bobbins, hooks and barbs.
She reaches out and snips
a slit in the day with tiny brass scissors.
The sun slides through the tear
And wake to see the runic heron
tow its long legs across the sky.
Rooks follow, black ribbons
unspooling.
It is time then
and we take tea-lights
to the hammer pond
while night seeps in
like a promise half-kept
and we light the dish of black water.
Now this small place
is an amphitheatre,
the stories we tell in whispers, epic.
Siân spins a yarn:
The way she tells it,
the scraggly milk thistle
moves at night
on tattered feet. I believe
she has that in her,
to tear herself from the soil,
to creep
close,
closer.
And at daybreak to replant her feet
in charcoal and clay,
far from home
and back again.
IV. Autumn equinox
(23 September 2010
sunrise: 06.47 am
sunset: 06. 57 pm)
The rosebay willowherb
has gone to spume.
Siân, leading the way,
finds a great web
blocks our path.
The spider – a stripy-legged man –
hovers in the corner of his larder-loom.
We have been out for an hour.
The birds are rousing.
My stomach growls.
I pick blackberries.
A hazel leaf shivers
and drops.
This wood was full of children
when I was young.
We built dens using cut branches
the men who came to coppice
left behind. And in the charcoal
pits lit fires, cooked our tea –
cans of beans and sausages.
We came here with matches
and small dogs
homemade bows and arrows
and paper boats
and penny chews.
We skinny-dipped
in the hammer pond,
stayed out too late,
let the glow worms
light us home.
I knew all the old stories:
dragons and devils,
saints and sweeps,
tusked wild boar,
the white bull lost
and still looking
for a way through.
At night sometimes
tucked up in bed
I heard him roar.
And yet for all that
the wood let us enter
and saw us leave
to live our lives,
grow up,
move away.
Now I think on it
there were only three of us
playing in the wood.
Sister, friend and me.
Now three again
constructing a sukkah
of willow and bracken.
Lying inside we look up,
see the tawny autumn
leaves and the blue sky.
Later I sit on an oak limb
shaggy with lichen.
The air is warm
on my bare arms.
I feel just right,
at home
here in my skin
and in the woods,
up to my ankles
in leaf-mould
and sphagnum moss.
Beyond
the clamour of insects
rises in waves and rolls down
the sun-struck meadow.
The shrilling fills the wood
like a hive brewing to swarm.
And yes, I hear you calling.
I take off my shoes.
Remember we said
we’d walk home barefoot?
The ground is warm
and turning.
Rebecca Hurst is a writer, opera-maker, illustrator and researcher based in Greater Manchester. Her poetry has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII. She is the author of a poetry pamphlet, The Fox’s Wedding (Emma Press, 2022). Rebecca has a PhD from the University of Manchester, and is co-founder of the Voicings Collective, an ensemble that devises new music theatre, and teaches creative writing in schools, universities, museums, and the community.
This poem was featured in PN Review 244, November - December 2018, and published this month in Rebecca’s debut collection, The Iron Bridge (March 2024). Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.