Green

I

A green tree, and a sunny earth! The grass was tall, thick and clean, and invited the sharp-edged sickle to fibrous snaps, to the whining exhale of verdured perfume. A hairline slick of shimmering oil lined each blade, thin coatings expressed against the sun’s familiar stare. Pieces of dirt, dust and detritus, lifted from the ground in the morning breath, flecked the sheeted ranks of organic grease – but the illusory shimmering remained.

Any passer-by would have been struck by a dumb, primordial urge to wrench and tear from the sweet-smelling pasture a fistful – not born of any raw appetite for destruction, but to feel the stringy roots beneath the earth’s surface firmly lodged, then broken, then rudely displaced in a jarring succession of sensations. As it is pulled from the ground, the soil tumbles back down – warm and dark, and soft underfoot.

II

The lost ivy lies coiled in the recesses of the forest, wherein it proves a dusty, languid progress. Too sprawling for grace, too rotten for decay, it lives after a fashion and in blindness. Ungainly it spreads its web across the forest floor, tendrils sleeping, waking, waxing, snaking, lacing every inch with an insomniac embrace. In the gloom and in the gleam, and in the folds of her half-dream, the empress ivy seeks to reap the fetid darkness of this place.

So her slumber is bathed in black. Spots of sun only, haphazardly wending their chaotic path through the undergrowth, reveal the coarse biotic leather bespattered with keratosis. The blight of obscurity goes unseen, the hum of neglect goes unheard, and beyond reach and breathless hang the quiet places of the earth.

III

The vivid, virid lily pad lives impeccably, and breathes forth a sigh of incandescent solace. Vibrant in the nocturne’s foreground, daylight in its wings, the green spills far and freely along a cast granite slab. A veneer of contiguous faces, looking warily outwards, past themselves and beyond the water; therein lies fluency, vigour, a clean spirit and a particular irreproachability, issued in equal measures in a lightly fluorescing glow. The lilies stay all tenebrous advances, and float silently watchful – the serene vigils of the night.

And yet there is a nervous faith that imbues the lily in its aquatic domicile. With a passing touch, the water’s indolent seal may be cleft in an impulsive affliction, and the water lily is reminded that for all the absolution of hydration, yet the garbled chords of dissolution attend hungrily upon its submergence. Thus the waxen pads congregate in the wells of stillness, in the delicate pools where they are most needed – but the lilies refuse turbulent waters their watch.

IV

A noble, stately canopy sings triumph to the skies! The tall, panoptic panoply of birds and leaves and trees! The foliage presses – with cacophonous caresses – and professes with a clarion the burst of morning light. Lapping around the mountain shoals the blanket is irregular and grizzled, and lies prostrate like a jaguar, pawing at the contours. Ribbons of mist streak the matted colloquy, before sinking into the understorey beneath dawn’s resumptive heat.

The defiant rooves of the forest do not look at their toes. They climb to serve, but stand far from their forgotten feet; their shadows are cast – but in black, and not in green. They turn upwards and outwards, and all memory of their sleeping bodies disintegrates in a valiant abstraction, a vacant rot. The exalted stratum divides dark and light, unites earth and air, matches, mixes and makes. But of time’s compound it stands ignorant. Built from below, drawn from above, the patchwork lenses of the world know neither decadence nor death, and chant their courageous youth into the face of the eternal.