The Birds Know

Winter is long. Snow, then snow on snow, darkness, cold, breathing the stale air of indoors too long— it wears you down after five months.

I begin to yearn for spring in February. I remember living in southern Ireland, how February brought in early spring— if the sun was out and you stood in the right building lee out of the wind you could feel it swelling your heart. But here February is the middle. Winter storms come like waves, wind tears trees down. Snow over all, damping sound, tracking through houses. On long nights when the sky is clear and the moon is pregnant with light, she lays it down across the whiteness.

Winter is a cold beauty. With the skill of a storyteller she holds spring back until the last, until you are desperate for it. And then one day winter lets go, just like that, no fanfare, no howling, just a vernal wind.



The birds know, they sing and flit in clumps, wingtips nearly touching. The blackbirds make short calls as if their voices have rusted over the winter and they grate and resist being used. Sparrows the colour of brown grass sing songs that I know from my earliest memories to mean spring. The ravens have a lookout in a tall spruce by my house and she calls a coarse warning and flies when I step outside, other black shapes lift and wing away.  Ice lets go its hold on the bank and bobs downriver almost invisible.



The hills fold into cloud, edges gone, the misty forest edge beckons me. Cows let out from their barn jump and gallop, cavorting in the dank warmth of early spring— It’s not really warm, but it’s warm enough.

Everyone knows it, spring has come, not on a designated day, but winter beggars can’t begrudge it. I feel winter’s bars loose on my chest as I walk to my shop, along the mud-rutted lane. Puddles reflect silver.

 

 

On my work bench I have fresh bronzes. I cast them yesterday, pouring the fulgent orange liquid into molds, then quenching them in water. I put my hand in the water which growls and screams as the hot investment boils into it. I pull out treasure— it filtered through my dreams onto paper then was carved in wax and now this solid undeniable thing. It will almost certainly outlive me and my children— someday some far human might find it clasping rotted leather and wonder who made it.



 



I’m almost to the chancy stage where I take all the disparate parts I have constructed, steel blade, leather sheath bronze parts, and put them together to make one thing.

 



Winter dreams, folded under her blanket of brown grass and swamp weed.

Spring cracks an eye— dog wood blushes blood red, snow pulls back to the edges of things, backs into corners, seeing it’s imminent demise. The swamp is already green.

Ice Worlds

It's cold. The old house bumps and snaps all night, contracting and settling like a restless sleeper. Outside the moon casts the night in a kind of black shadowed parody of day. It's quiet, along the brook trees crack like gunshots. The sap expands as it freezes and splits the bark, letting out a sharp crack in the crushing stillness.

It's easy to stay inside when it's this cold, but I work alone and it's no good-- I have to get out, breath frosty air, interact with the world. Today around noon I took my camera out into the still world and walked up the brook. It's cold enough to freeze running water. What I find in the ice suggests ancient alien worlds, three dimensional photographs of turmoil, or far galaxies. I see what look like half formed arcane letters or gaping faces. The secrets a frozen brook keeps.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barbarian Dagger - Kullervo

This dagger, named after the Finnish tragic hero Kullervo, is loosely inspired by antenna hilted knives from the Hallstatt period. It's forged of four strands of pattern-welded steel-- the two center strands are nine layers each and the spine and edge are seven hundred layers. I found it in a dark drawer down a side corridor of my subconscious.



At its widest point Kullervo is 4.8cm and it is 38.5cm long. The stand is birds-eye rock maple.

The Hidden Mouth

If you'd like to see larger versions of the photos included in this essay, just click on them.

The last time I went looking for dragons, and wrote of it here, it was early spring. There was a sense of decayed things emerging, then being overgrown, sublimated into green watercress. This time it's winter, things are buried.
The snow has come. It came late this year, the time between leaf-fall and snow-fall lingered until it seemed familiar, the way things might stay. When the snow did come, it came howling in sideways, preceded by ice and water. It ripped through powerlines breaking them and our little house was without electricity for twenty five hours. Not before I went out into the storm though. Into the forest which shivered and stilled, leaned away from the gale and caught snow in lines up the north east side of its trunks.

When the storm was over it had left winter behind it, gentler snow falls came in its wake.

Now I walk up the path through the forest to the dark place between the hills.

This is the day before the longest night and even in the early afternoon as I walk into the forest, the light dims. Snow has made the familiar path strange. Ahead, a set of tracks emerge and run straight up the white trail. They are big, the length of my palm. The wolf's cousin has been this way.

Eastern coyotes are as big as wolves but different. They combine the jackal nature of the smaller western coyote with the size of the grey wolves they interbred with and replaced as they colonized this region.

I walk on, following half-wolf tracks in the snow. It's like a pencil drawing, shaded with sketchy lines, all white and grey and black. Then a sudden shock of colour-- a pool filled with water-weeds like green fire.

I walk along the steep hillside looking down into powdered tree sketched dells.  I come to the hidden mouth. Trees have fallen down the bank and now grow sideways obscuring the entrance, but I can see a hint of darkness behind them. A breath of earthy air touches my nostrils and cheeks as I approach, careful not to let my feet break through the snow covered branches. I don't want to fall in the brook.

Under the branches, through a screen of trees, the ravine opens up, hung with ice and running back into the place between hills. It gurgles water over brown pebbles and under snow covered fallen trees.

I climb into the dark space, look up with feet planted on either side of the narrow crack, water below me. High above, trees zigzag towards the sky.

A pile of fallen roots in the dimness looks like it might hide some shadowy tentacled thing, drawing unwary prey towards it with water gurgles and icicle light.

By now it's getting dark and when I return to my workshop I have to turn the lights on to work.

On my table are my design tools, pencils, vellum, compass and calipers, and a sword blade. I'm trying out using the system of geometry that my friend Peter Johnsson discovered to help define the proportions of a sword hilt, but I'll tell you about that in more detail in a later post. For now I can be thankful that I made it back safe and dry from my excursion. My pencil scratches vellum in the warm lamp light and the wind howls through a crack and spatters snow against the dark window.

Mushrooms and an Axe

It’s as if the mushrooms' folded world has its own colour spectrum, warm and dark; brown, orange, red and yellow, a shiver of green in the darkness of a decaying log. Trees curve over the steep valley, grey barked, zigzagging the distant sky. This is a house of trees, earth walls rise steep on either side of the stoney floor, thick with moss. Branches are everywhere, the branches have mushrooms growing on them.


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Dark Hollow

The forest king’s son hides in plain sight, the colour of dry spruce bark and fallen needles. How long must the spruce tree and frog have lived side by side to match each other’s skins? 

Down by the dry August riverbed, in the dark hollow, tree stumps watch with implacable empty eyes. Boreal chickadees swoop around me to land on dead branches like the notes of an insistent living song.

 

 

High on the hillside big old maples and moss-trunked beech listen to the young trees shush and dapple light. This part of the forest is quiet and brooding in high summer, shaded by leaves. The ground is wound with roots, like the woven fingers of old people, waiting. 

Here in the deep woods and at its edge with the sparse grassed field, the summer ebbs. 

The plants put forth their seed-down, ready to let go, to release next years hope into the wind.

 

Between Deep Water and Dark Forest

"Turning tides, their regularities!

What is the heart, that it ever was afraid,

Knowing as it must know spring's release,

Shining heart, heart constant as the tide?"

                                     - Seamus Heany

[from the dutch of J.C. Bloem (1887-1966)]

High wind cut cold North Atlantic water in tattered edged waves, curving and crashing, and then sucking smooth pebbles in foam froth.

On the abrupt coast, spruce trees leaned over cliffs in sharp edged late winter sun.

The liminal space between deep water and dark forest was protected by a coastal ridge from the wind; but the sea was tossed, turbulent, humped in white edged rollers, coming in from the bay, carrying the smells of salt and sandstone.

Gulls curved along the rocky shore, past the stacked ghosts of pebble beaches a hundred million years old, exposed by the gnawing ocean.

Walking along the water I found the sun fallen in shards and captured it to bring it here to this strange place and show it to you.