Not owning a property, I don’t own a fence or a wall. I’m not sure that is the reason, but I suppose it could in part be why posts seem to have become a minor theme for me. Or it could be just be that, in a populous and long-cultivated island like Britain, lines and boundaries, old and new, are so plentiful as to be unavoidable. You are always bumping into the edge of someone else’s definition of something.
In places that generally feel quite wild for the drawing of lines on the land, posts of one sort or another – wood, stone, metal – are generally hard to avoid. In the hills – even (or the perhaps especially) when wires are long gone, old fenceposts are often handy waymarks for walkers – especially in fog or snow. At any rate I seem to have become attached to some of them, and developed needs to tap, listen to their sounds, and daydream a little about their stories…
Ventifact
High up, near the drystane shelter
between Leacach and Maol
by the ridge dyke, by iron spikes –
once I was an older fence of wood.
Wind beat time and ice and rain
and drummed norther posts
down to the final nubs
of outsized Argos pencils.
I retain my tensioned form –
grain-split twisting sinuosity,
a lime-dried wrist upthrust
wire-clench tight, though
not to punch. To punctuate.
Sculpted dot on a broken line.
Air’s song is what it moves –
I am an artefact of invisibles.
I am dictation. I am a note.
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