I want to say this tree is erratic.
Like the boulders you will see sitting provisionally in a field waiting for the next glacier to scoop them up, bundle them a long for a few millenia, and then drop them next to stolid cattle.
This boy walks apart from the others, he has a scuffed briefcase instead of a sportsbag. He is head-down-trudging, wrapped up in thoughts, missing the immediacy of the crunchy snow under his feet. Another boy, pink-cheeked, gleeful, rolls a hard stone in the soft snow, pitches it at the first boy. It's the kind of snowball that will smash glasses or leave a red welt on a leg.
I want to say this tree is erratic because it shouldn't be here, growing precariously out of the limestone; there are no other trees around. Yet here is this sudden tree: singular, self-possessed, resourceful.
It turns out that I collect these erratic trees. Looking through old photos I find another. This one lives on a Brontean moor, bent double by the prevailing wind. Just looking at it you can feel every agonising gust. Still it endures.
noether@slippery.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.slippery.freeserve.co.uk
a sudden bird soaring over the world Becoming a writer books spill onto shelves dense little piles of paragraphs her eyes were brimming with souls intimacy is lost My head is ticking odd little surges of emotion She was a determined hedonist she wore her anxiety like bad makeup she wrote because it was necessary the constant disappointment of eschatologists waiting eagerly for the end of the world the silence spoons me you could lose yourself in the curl of her finger you're sweet but I don't want you
I miss /msg conversations with sensei. I remember the time I was in a slough of despond and complaining about the remorseless grey clouds and he told me to imagine that the sky was cast in pewter.