the heart's dark lonely nebula (poem)

The little egret who in previous winters has roosted at night in the big oak down by the brook has been absent this winter – until Saturday, when he/she appeared solo; and then on Monday s/he brought a friend. Egrets have been colonising Devon's estuaries for maybe 15 or 20 years now, but they still look exotic and foreign, and inland even more so, their snowy-white standing out against our rather drab winter shades.

For ten years I lived on the little Bere peninsula, the confluence of the Tavy and the Tamar near where Devon and England both give way across the water to the ancient Duchy of Cornwall – Kernow, to those of us who come from there. I loved that world: its micro-ecosystem, its proximity to the moor, but the ever-changing water (it's tidal there) offering a flux I like. There's a small causeway running alongside the river, with a reedy hinterland graced with an occasional lightning flash of kingfisher. Once or twice a grass snake would emerge under the road-bridge to have a little swim in the salty water. Always there are egrets, strutting and peering, and heron too.

The northwest coasts of Devon and Cornwall are utterly different from the southeast coasts. North is wild, dramatic, uplifting. The southeast coasts are a landscape of tidal creeks, saltmudflats and little backwaters, wooded and mysterious. I'm a northwest person, but I've come to love these tidal creeks (and they are too reminiscent for me of holidays spent on my cousins' farm as a child, riding out alongside creeky water, down on the east Cornish coast).

Yesterday I took my bereaved dad down to the peninsula in the bright clear cold of a February afternoon. It's full moon (in Leo), and at its height the spring tide at the full and new moons washes over the causeway: a little subversive reminder to us all that there are things we still can't control, like the moon's tug. I like this, too. My dad and I took the tiny path between trees perched over the rising tide; the last light of the day echoing off the chrome-yellow lichen of the rocks to gild the water lapping at the rushes (where yes a little egret was stooping for water creatures). It occurs to me that the lichen on rocks near the sea is often unusually brightly coloured – a deep yolk-yellow. I wonder if this is specific to salt water air? There's a permanent colony of Canada geese here (to my fury one or two of the locals used to shoot them, but badly, so that occasionally they would be left maimed rather than killed); a flotilla of 60-odd was floating out in the channel. The daffodils are out (this used to be known as the 'fruit and flower basket of the West' – the climate is mild, so early cropping is normal, and the little branch railway would take flowers up to Covent Garden, and the woods are full of a variety of types of escapee daffodils). Already bluebells are spiking well here, and the snowdrops flush all the corners white.

One of the treats about visiting my dad and my old haunts is the drive back across the moor in the dimpsy, the tors softly charcoaled, sky luminous and yesterday that fat moon in the east; the pony herds, little Galloway cattle and the black-faced Scotch sheep who do well on these sparse uplands; ravens, buzzards, snipe and as I near home an owl.

These landscapes stir something in me, and many of my poems push above the surface of the saltmud or the moor in my imagination.

My next collection, All the Missing Names of Love (mostly poems from 2004-9), is due out in early April, and here's one from near Bere Ferrers; inspired partly by Robert MacFarlane's profoundly beautiful book of the poem's title (they're mostly not bleak, though this one is I suppose, a bit; a certain despair in relation to really knowing another person; written at the end of a relationship): 

Reading The Wild Places 

And look how it all in the end

falls back into silence:

these walls, the battles ceded or ‘won’

(as if we don’t all lose);

the fertile fetch between us

quiet as the deserts

between stars.

I read yesterday how many tons

of photons strike us in the course of one day –

how we’re more ‘gap

than join’.

Later, on the causeway

glimpsing the kingfisher stitch light

back across the mudflats,

I remembered that a Manx shearwater

in its life flies as far as the moon

and back; but us –

                        oh yes

I may kiss your mouth today,

molecule to dancing molecule;

and still

what’s most real within me

might remain unlaunched;

may never make the leap between

my heart’s dark lonely nebula

and yours.

© Roselle Angwin