stairwell

Hey all,

Here's a picture from the castle reminiscent of both the snails that skate the long blades of the grasses near the river as well as the last set of stairs before the attic and my room.

The writing here is like the weather; some days it blares, pours through all the windows, calls you out. Other days, the fog pours from the glen and you just can't get warm. No writing then, or only poems about fires in the grate, the circle of his arms, warm pillows.

Reading furiously. The first two weeks it was the novels of former fellows, frissoned by the fact that some of them had been written while in my room. Lately it has been Canadian poetry, brought with me. I've been enjoying Don McKay's Camber, especially as we're constantly surrounded by birds, from the owl skeleton drying in the courtyard, to the rook in its cage, to the buzzards gliding and dropping for the dead fox in the forest. I've also been braving death, collecting mushrooms I can' t place in the forest to make windowsill spore prints.

Of course, everything I've collected and seen on the wing is frightfully common, but then in a way so am I...

Yesterday, I went on a three and a half hour walk with a fellow Fellow. We found a cave face with pictographs, spirals and whorls carved into the sandstone that the administrator knew about from ancient travel journals but hadn't found in the year he's been here. We also scrambled from the path to the river, from the river to the path, up and down in the leaf litter, bracken and bones. We walked the river in rubber boots, picking our way between the individual insects that make up a river-swarm that never quite touched our skin, between the worn bricks and bits of crockery, between the sun-lit branches to one side and the mossy stone on the other.

Splendid day, probably one of the best of my life. Also sat out in the courtyard and wrote seven pages of poetry. Also felt burnished by sun, sipping apple cider with a wreath of clover wound around my neck.

Wrenched my arm though. Got nettled, as much by the idea that I will have to leave these people & this place as by the plants themselves.

Smooches.

A.