 Grey Triggerfish, Balistes capriscus, in a sea pool in Ireland Kintsugi, or Kintsukuroi is the centuries-old Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold, silver or platinum. The scars and seams are not hidden, but visible: a golden root system. Somehow the object becomes more valued, more artful than it was before it fell. This is what fish do: they solder their own wounds shut with a silverish joinery. The first time I discovered this, I was swimming in the centre of a shoal of schooling Axillary Seabream, Pagellus acarne. Either I was herding them, or they were choreographing me. It wasn’t clear. I moved in their hundreds. Right in the centre of this thicket, was an injured fish. It was like seeing a semi-precious stone. The mending of silver caught the light - it shone more than the other fish, it looked like an abstract sculpture, with a crescent of its body missing from a large fish or seabird bite. Unlike birds, fishes’ appearance don't differ so much between males and females, so schooling fish have a slight cloned affect. It looks very military, very shepherded, very surreal. The more you study them and return to the same place, the more you notice their differences. The school I was swimming with were quite young and mostly all male. Gender roles are not so binary as they are in our species and many fish change sex, or are hermaphrodites. Like gulls, some fishes’ characteristics change as they age and you can ‘date’ them by these changes. For others, their size and shape indicates when they swap genders. One of the most dramatic transformations is that of Wrasse. They have a kind of light bulb moment, but the light bulb grows in the top of their head. They look partially inflated. Clownfish have a matriarchal system; when the top female dies, the most dominant male becomes a female in her place. Fish are some of the trickiest things to identify; their size is distorted by the water, as is their colour depending on light, threat, depth, weather, time of day, age. When you’re learning to identify marine species and you do a search online, the images that come back are almost always of a hanging: their bodies held up, in a man’s arms, laid in ice, or on a plate. I had not anticipated this. I expected them to be alive and in water. It is as strange to me as it would be if all the images of Blackbirds, Robins and Goldfinches, were not of them in flight, or perched, but fried and bald, or swinging upside down with their beaks pierced. The words that comes up again and again, are not species, habitat, ecology; but game, restaurant, aquarium. The colours of fish underwater are extraordinary, especially turquoise. Many fish have a current of electric, azure blue roped and zig-zagged around them. A new visitor to our waters is the Grey Triggerfish, Balistes capriscus. I got a close look at one earlier this summer when it tried one of my toes. It has a wonderful blue pointillist pattern. Nothing is ever the same when you go underwater: one day all the crabs will be circumnavigating a buffet of rocks, the next starfish are splayed like drunk party guests; then the day after that, there is an underwater smog, so thick you can’t see anything. My most unusual experience, was the day thousands of small salp-like organisms were near the shore, floating around me like hollow planets. I am still trying to solve what they were. I think the poets that often come to mind when I’m swimming in the sea, or studying fish are Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Norgate and H.D. And for abundance - for all their plurals and collective nouns, this poem, by Galway Kinnell. Daybreak
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 The longest shadow in the world, taken at dawn, from the peak of Mount Teide. When you don’t speak a language, you hear how things are said, the energy in a conversation, and notice when people choose to say nothing. This weekend, I climbed Spain’s highest mountain: Mount Teide. I did it with a group of native Spanish speakers from the Canary Islands, Latin America and mainland Spain. As we hiked up the mountain - the patterns, and regularity of certain words changed. When we began: “vamos”; when we walked into the shadow of the mountain it was “frío”; each time we stopped and turned around “bonita”; as we walked out in total darkness at 5am: silence, no one spoke; as we ascended “silueta”, as we reached the crater at dawn and saw the world’s longest shadow stretching over the Atlantic: “la sombra”. A few years ago, I went to FLUPP festival in a favela in Rio and remember noticing how people's conversations felt like they had a temperature: they seemed to bubble and ping and were so full of gusto and vim, compared with the flatness of my own language (where people speak to each other as if they’re not fully awake yet). I love this about languages like Spanish, Portuguese and Italian: how they take off. Everything sounds caffeinated. I feel so tethered, compared to exclamations of ‘a’s and ‘o’s and the rolling engine of ‘r’s. Earlier this year, a poem had risen up in me, dream-like, about Teide Violets - a flower that pretty much only grows on this volcano, on the island of Tenerife, at a specific altitude. It is a small and massive poem to me: about how maternally protective I feel, and heartbroken by the loss and vulnerability of certain species. The poem will be published in the forthcoming Climate Change issue of Magma magazine. In the poem, I walk up the volcano through the night, guided by a man I don’t know.  La sombra del Teide at dusk. View from the Mountain Refuge. In the Mountain refuge on Saturday evening, a wonderful Venezuelan woman, Aliee, that my friend and I’d met, said: “This is not chance. I have been looking for you.” The whole experience had this feel to me. I found myself living the poem that had come to me three months earlier. I had not planned to climb the mountain, definitely not with a male guide, and had no idea that when you climb Teide, this is how you do it: in the night, in blackness - such blackness that you can’t even see the silhouette of the mountain, where it stops and where the night sky begins. You walk up into galaxies and shooting stars and the smear of the milky way. We were a group of about 20. When I looked up or down and saw the trail and clusters of headlamps along the path I thought we looked like our own constellations. My mother used to say to me as a child that I was made from stardust and this journey felt like us returning ourselves to the heavens. When I re-read Johanna Spyri’s children’s book Heidi this summer, the mountain felt like one of the main characters. So much of the narrative centres on them climbing up and down it like a ladder. Mount Teide felt like our plot. We walked into it. We crossed into its shadow with such relief to finally be out of sun and heat, then turned from it when we reached the Altavista Refuge only to see its sombra across the earth's atmosphere, with Gran Canaria next to it seeming to grow out of clouds. On a clear day you can see every one of the canary islands from Mount Teide and you can see Mount Teide from every one of the islands. Its shadow is so vast, that it is like watching an eclipse. It has a halo around its crater, and drapes like cloth over the surrounding mountain range, ocean and islands. The higher you get up the mountain, the harder it is to make out what is sea and what is sky, unless there are boats; and as you ascend, it becomes impossible to look at anything but where your feet are. There are vents and cracks which your sticks get jammed in, plus a fallen empire of rubble, loose rocks and scree to slip and turn your ankle on. Last year, I went to Iceland. As the plane flew in, I thought the landscape looked traumatised. Teide National Park is the same: an outburst, made by fire and heat, wounded. The earth is black and red and brown - broken and cut and coughed up and turned and spilled. It looks like chaos. There has been no water here to sooth it, as there was in the landscapes I grew up in, that were softened and made slowly by water, carrying and holding the memory of it in their undulations and cupped hands. The making of this place feels abrupt, violent. I can’t say if I felt happy in it. An English poet called Helen Mort has written a brilliant collection about female mountaineers and mountaineering, No Map Could Show Them. As part of the research she hiked in crinoline skirts and petticoats to recreate what some women would have worn. In my group, on the first day, a phenomenal woman, Rossi, climbed the mountain in hotpants, a Glee-style crop top and sideways basketball cap. She was the sun of our group - even in the darkness and tiredness of the second day. She lead at the front for much of the hike, would Facetime her brother, Ivan, at various altitudes (and we’d all wave back at him in his warm house), she sang to us to keep our energy up, had us laughing and taking selfies at every stage, and got a collection together to tip the bus driver on the way back. Another man played R&B very loudly for two hours from his phone, dancing and skipping around each curve of the track, at the rest stops some people would light up and many people chatted on their mobiles as they hiked up until the signal was lost. I loved the lack of reverence and conformity. I had not pictured myself mountaineering with Despacito as my backing track. It felt freeing and unBritish. It reminded me of when I’d go skiing, listening to Bollywood and hip-hop all the way down the slopes. Two of my favourite international poets are mountain women: Bejan Matur and Kutti Revathi. Bejan is a Kurdish poet who was born and brought up on a farm in the mountains of north Turkey. Mountains are so present in her work that even though she left many years ago, they still live in her. The more you confine me, Kutti is a Tamil poet who lives and has the courage of someone who has grown up overcoming the difficulties of height and distance. She lives in mountainous Tamil Nadu in India, runs a feminist literary magazine and explores the landscape and reclaiming of the female body. The first poem I read of hers is called Mulaigal, Breasts and was translated by the late Lakshmi Holmström in the anthology Wild Girls Wicked Words. BREASTS One of the most beautiful books written about how mountains inhabit you, is Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. When I go to watch the deer rutting each autumn in Richmond Park and hear their bellows and horns interlocking (which sound just like the crunch of American football players), I think of her descriptions of the stags jousting to the death in the Cairngorms. There is something that brings us to mountains. Sometimes as healing places, as in Susan Trott's Holy Man trilogy, sometimes as safe spaces, as our ancestors did in the previous ice ages and on migratory routes, and sometimes to prove to ourselves that we can be where we weren’t made to be: where we can walk at the bottom of the ocean floor and step in and out of clouds.
There are as many blues underwater as there are greens above. You don’t notice it when you’re down there. But afterwards, when you’re looking through photos or videos, it’s the first thing you see: Ink, Bombay Sapphire, Glacial - and you a dark putto, hovering in a sky. You can feel a bit like an icon under there with the sunbeam halos, glories and water-spectres. I've been doing a diving course over the last few weeks. Each time our instructors wanted to teach us something, they would gather us on the seafloor in a circle, or facing them, and show, or sign to us what we needed to know and do next. I’ve learned many lessons in my underwater school: to navigate by the direction of sand ripples, or the angle of the sun; that I can make myself the weight of water, and when I weigh what water weighs, I need do nothing but lay on my tummy, gravity-less, an astronaut being swashed around a little by the tides; I’ve watched how teachers' and students' breaths become alchemy: lava-lamp like, mercury streams that merge with one anothers’, and are pulled aside like a stage curtain. One of the things I was most nervous about, was one of the the things I enjoyed most. For one exercise, I had to release my air and turn it into a furious torrent - a kind of upside down waterfall which I then sipped from with the corner of my mouth. In Spanish, the word for waterfall is cascada. It was this, but the wrong way round, in this jaunty world where the ceiling seems to be the floor. The thing that blew me away, was that it tasted sweet, and that I was in water, ‘sipping’ air like a kitten. After each dive my mouth would feel a little puckered - as if I’d been blowing balloons up for too long. I was silenced by the water - exhausted, and very still, very quiet. Each night, when I lay down, I had dock rock and would be swaying and lifted in a phantom choreography. On our second dive, I missed the surface - I had culture shock: a homesickness and longing for the familiar comfort of breezes, noise, voices. When you dive, red is the first colour you lose. Then orange. Yellow follows. Green. Blue. And finally, violet. You can measure and know how deep you are by their loss. The depths of the sea carry the same names as dawn and dusk and night: twilight, midnight, sunlight zone. A deep-sea diver told me that one time, she was surrounded by so much blue that the only way she knew which way was up, was by watching her air bubbles. I often think of this descent as a breaking up and dismantling of the rainbow, until only a celestial black space is left - it reminds me of a poem called The Darker Sooner by Catherine Wing. Then came the darker sooner, In Richard Dawkins’ book about the partnership of art and science, Unweaving the Rainbow, he opens with a reference to John Keats. Once, when everyone had sat down for a dinner, Keats raised his glass and proposed a toast "to the confusion of Newton". When his friend (and fellow Romantic) William Wordsworth paused before drinking, and asked what he meant, Keats replied: "Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism." Do not all charms fly The sciences used to be called Natural Philosophy; and Scientists - Natural Philosophers, thinkers, questioners - wondering and imagining. I have found nothing unpoetic in science and have no less awe for trying to understand things to a molecular or chemical level. In fact, I see more of a kinship between poets and scientists than I do other artforms sometimes: both are diligent observers, both trying to capture, understand and convey something honestly. Both are wonderers. There are many young poets working in this way: Marshallese poet and climate change activist, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner - and in the UK: Dom Bury, Isabel Galleymore, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Jen Hadfiled and Nancy Campbell to mention only a few. Science is poetic, ought to be poetic, has much to learn from poets and should press good poetic imagery and metaphor into its inspirational service." It has only been a day since I finished the course and already I am missing being underwater. For me, the best classrooms are not rooms and the best lessons - not just factual, but felt: what it feels like to look a sea turtle in the eye, so close you see yourself reflected in its iris - and then to have this ancient creature, (whose species is 150-million years old) swim vertically up over your body; how it feels to always have someone beside you and you both looking out for each other (most of SCUBA teaching focuses on how to save, calm and keep each other safe); what it’s like when a species of fish you haven’t seen before drips down in front of you unexpectedly; and most of all, what it is to be in a border-less space that connects every part of our planet. You feel, truly, part rather than apart, as if you could go everywhere.
 Photo by Samuel de León from San Blas Fiesta  I never thought language could be a flute. Or that we could be birds. This week I heard a language that I’ve read about, but never seen, never heard or watched ‘spoken’. It was a concert. It wheeled through the air all around me. I had to spin and turn each time someone new ‘spoke’. Their questions were swifts - moving over me and by me and beside me: from down by the waves, up on a path, out on one of the fishing boats. A young woman next to me put her knuckle to her lips, whistled an answer, and that seemed to silence the questioners. It may have been the most mundane conversation about where to have lunch, but to me it was one of the most beautiful and startling things I will ever hear. Off to the west, there is an island called La Gomera. Some days it is visible, some not. The whole island is pretty much one mountain. The language I was listening to originated here. El Silbo, or Silbo Gomero is not an intimate, whispered language; it is a public one, loud and boisterous and made for the open air. It is a Sheppard’s tongue: created in response to how the land settled in deep ruts and runnels. It is ancient and comes from North Africa, (inspired by imitating birds I imagine), and created because the human voice would not carry itself far enough. A friend once witnessed it save a boys life. He’d fallen in a ravine up in the hills and was communicating with someone over a mile away down in the harbour. The man in the harbour managed to find out what had happened, check how badly the boy was hurt and get an ambulance to him through whistling. I wanted immediately for there to be poetry in el silbo. But perhaps there doesn’t need to be. Perhaps it doesn’t need to be shaped into something it already is. A few years ago I spent the summer with some friends in a small town near the Jhelum river, in the north of Pakistan. The tiers of social life in Pakistan are wonderful: there is the ground floor with the welcome of living and dining rooms, shared sleeping rooms above and then the flat rooftops - where you can chat to aunties and cousins and neighbors, or watch children dousing themselves with cold water and playing. Some days, I would sit with my friend’s little brother as he was flying his kite from the roof. The whole sky would be full of them. The whistling sounds they made were a form of swordsmanship. To me they were just kites, but he would say oh that one's Fahad’s, that one's Haroon’s… He knew who each kite belonged to, who had rivalries, which friends would be running out to the streets below to claim the kite that had just been cut, who was the fastest runner. It was like a social gathering in the sky. Over the last few years, I have been learning different bird calls. Up in the highlands here in Tenerife I’ve taught myself to call the blue chaffinches down from their branches - it’s such a thrill to see them flying in from around the pine forest - moving closer and closer from branch to branch. In London, on Hampstead Heath, a bird watcher taught me to beckon and ‘chat’ with owls and another friend in Lewes taught me to call swans to me. When it works you feel like a magician. Hearing el silbo also reminded me of call and response poetry, of mushairas and the great oral tradition (in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Punjabi, Pashtun, Celtic, and African counties) of telling poetry to our hearts, not written down and read with eyes cast down; but remembered by our bodies and recited to the air. One of the world’s greatest writers, by some beautiful fortune, chose the sea as her subject. In her acceptance speech, when she won the National Book Award in 1952 for The Sea Around Us, she said: The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry… Today, I got to kneel in loosely blown sand on the oceanfloor and write. I knelt in front of a Pink Smith Damselfish: a dive slate on my wrist, a flounder beside my knee, wet book and stubby pencil in my hand. One of the things I hadn't thought about before learning to dive was holding hands. Sometimes I feel we adults can talk a little too much with an empty space between us and no connection or understanding. The dives have been mute, and yet so full of dialogue, there's been so much laughter under the water, reassurance, affirmations, touch, eye contact that felt more like conversations, physical slapstick, support, and most of all, us all holding onto each other and not letting anyone twist off course, be lifted by the current, or float up too far. It was my friend's turn to be the balloon today and I the kiteflyer, whose hand reached up and caught hers. The level of contact is the kind you give and get when nursing and caring for someone. I felt held all day: by the water and one another. Whenever I write poetry in the sea, I think of Rachel Carson. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, she thought of the prose she wrote as poetry, and was called the scientist-poet of the sea. Because we know land better than water, she is more well respected for Silent Spring, her final book, but it is her sea trilogy that I’ve taken into my heart and think is her most evocative writing: The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and Under the Sea-Wind. She once told a friend that after her death, she wanted to be re-incarnated as a tern. To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.” In her life, she only got to dive once. From her writing, you would think she could only exist underwater. She made the quiet sea crackle for me when I read about and listened to the seafloor through archive recordings that she'd described - which had just been captured in the 1940s. I think often of how much the oceans need her hope and sense of wonder now, her voice.
 The first breath you take underwater is a miracle. Having been hiking, backpacking, travelling and moving excessively, since I left home as a teenager, I have carried many heavy things on my back, but never breath. Never my own air. You feel how much weight water holds: when you stop wading out and fall back into the waves, then go to your knees, as if asking for forgiveness or marriage and look up at the molten, rocking surface far above you.
Yesterday, I went to the bottom of the sea. Not for moments and glimpses. Not for as long and as far as a single breath. For almost an hour I skimmed the bottom and sank and mistakenly surfaced and sank again and swam through the traffic of fish. I felt as slow and deliberate as a paintbrush. We were children all afternoon: myself, my friend and our two dive masters. Both of them have the presence and delight of people who have found exactly what they want to do in life and found a way to do it. One instructor, Jack is an equanimous man with exceptional taste in loud shirts, who recently set up his dive college here in Tenerife. Our other trainer, Lee - is tattooed from ceiling to floor, painted with the sea, his body is a dedication to diving and marine life, with inked octopus tentacles twisting around his arm from elbow to wrist. Both are full of kindness, consideration and mirth, and have a deep respect for the sea and how its inhabitants should be treated - not as tourist attractions or circus shows to be petted or fed - but as autonomous creatures who are not there for us to witness, or interfere with, but who we can help protect. They are my kind of people: Peter Pans on this Never-Never Island. This evening, I have been mostly at the surface instead - snorkeling around some of the coast, diving down momentarily and dangling upside down, bat-like to get closer looks at adult lizard fish, splayed star fish and crabs nibbling and circumnavigating a buffet of rocks. Lots of naturalists have a patch, a beat which they survey and walk throughout the years. I feel like this about my little stretch of coast - I note the seasons under water, what’s abundant when and where. Sometimes the water is almost greasy, sometimes foggy, sometimes foaming with spume - tonight, it was as if someone had just cut their lawn after a long absence: strands of sea grass clogged the surface. I swam a little further out to avoid them, to where the rocks look more like they’re covered in ash and the water gets darker, colder, deeper and my kick stronger. I was rounding one of the peninsulas when I saw something large heading toward me. My autonomic nervous system choose fright. I stopped, breath held, statue-like. It was swimming higher than the stingrays I’d seen in this area. As it got closer I saw what it was: Caretta caretta - a Loggerhead Sea Turtle, tortuga in Spanish - with its griraffe-patterned head and flippers, its slow, undulating motion, as if brushing the water away from its sides. It is the first time in my life I have seen one underwater. It is not an area where I’ve ever known divers see them. They are a vulnerable species here, endangered and threatened elsewhere. Watching it made me think of the advice shared with David Lindo in The Urban Birder, which I have followed ever since I read it: to look at everything that moves, to look at it intently - even if it seems familiar to you and to not have preconceptions of what you will and won't see in the field - simply to go out expecting to see anything.  I grew up and spend some of the year near Wenlock Edge and Robert Hart’s Forest Garden. The last time I was there I saw a lone fox pausing beneath his orchard trees. It was the first time I’d seen a fox in the wild. At the time, I was living in London and was used to seeing foxes almost daily: peering in at me through the front window, asleep under a hedge in a council estate, walking on railway lines before the first morning train, next to honking roundabouts in Westminster. They often seemed to occupy liminal places and times. To see them in such a manicured city was always a great, wild gift.
Each time I see Robert Hart’s abandoned garden, I feel a sense of grief at what once was. He was a visionary and his garden was a hopeful place, a garden of possibility, showing what you can do with any land, of any size, anywhere. When he was still alive, my mother had come circle dancing here, in and around the trees. I wish still that his garden could live and be restored. I have no doubt it would be a mecca, a touchstone that people could come to and see what their own hands can do. Robert was a fascinating person, he was a soldier and code-breaker in World War II, a vegan, he compiled some of Ghandi’s teachings for Reuters and made his garden to create a nourishing, healing space for him and his brother, who was born with severe learning disabilities. Yesterday, I spent the morning in a forest garden, a small farmstead on a mountain called El Roque, in the south of Tenerife. From it, you can just glimpse the top of El Teide volcano and hikers’ routes, from Roque de Jama, pass at the end of the lane. It seems to be on the stage of a vast amphitheatre of silence and birds, with mountains surrounding it. Beneath grapevines, almond, peach, pomegranate, fig, lemon and custard apple trees - potatoes, corn, cabbage, lillies, fennel, dahlias, onions, lemon grass, lemon verbena and parsley grow; yellow cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and squash are bound up with physalis, like tangled USB cables. The garden is about 600m above sea level. As I harvested, a relief of calima breeze blew in from out at sea. Each time it came, I stood for it as if in church and as I was weeding, the scent of lemon blossom and fennel surrounded me. To pick hot fruit from trees, vines and low on the ground - to feel their soft, orb heat, then to peel back the dry lanterns of physalis, or twist off orange tomatoes, or knock your forehead into grapes, then press them to your mouth is one of the greatest sensual pleasures in life. After working the garden, I returned to sea-level for a phone meeting (with the wonderful Poetry Translation Centre). I am working on a poetic translation of a war poem full of anger and hope, by Somali poet Amran Maxamed Axmed. The poem will be part of an anthology to be published later this year. For over an hour with Erica Hesketh, Edward Doegar and co-editors Said Jama Hussein and Bill Herbert, we looked at the poem like scientists and philosophers, questioning and weighing each word against another, against the original poem’s sound and force and the literal translation’s imagery and meaning. When finished I filled my belly with pressed grapes and went to San Blas beach to feel the cloth of the sea. I wasn’t even three metres out when I swam into a huge, lime-hedge-like school of sweetlips. Over 200 silverish-white fish, flashing their yellow fins as they circled around me. I held my breath in the centre of them as if in the nucleus of a massive bird's nest.  A few years back, I came across a book in which the authors sat on a beach and read Richard Jefferies' autobiography, The Story of My Heart until the waves reached their toes. The duration of their reading was the duration of a changing tide. I love the idea of the sea as a timer, an hourglass, sucked in at the waist, then eating its fill.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with the length of poems. In May, I composed a poem whilst walking along a friend’s lane in Drisheen in rural Cork. Each night I’d walk this lane, just as the light was almost gone. Often by the time I returned it would be dark, and the bats would be on their circuits above me. This lane is the same lane where my uncle was carried from a wake-house to the cemetery where he is buried. It was his last journey, and our last with him. It is a lane where I’ve felt many things throughout the years: despair, bliss, comfort, awe, grief, giddy happiness, the beginnings of love. It is what you’d call a deep lane, a green lane, an ancient way, or a holloway - the track is low as a trench beneath the fields at some parts, it is like a walled garden in others and at night there is such a complete blackout that you can’t see your feet. You walk like an astronaut - slow, high steps. It allows you to believe we’re in space and a dark place in this messy rift of stars and planets. One night, a sentence came to me as I was heading up. The line was: To walk along the lane at night, is to see god and to see god is to know yourself. I am not a religious person, god has never entered my writing, so this line took me by surprise. I decided to take the line for a walk the next day and speak the poem to the air, using a dictaphone. The length and time it took to walk the lane, would be the length of the poem and time it took to make the poem. Each turn in the track was a new stanza. There were two small intermissions when I stopped to chat to a painter who lives halfway down the lane, and when my cousins turned into the bottom of the lane as I was mid-description, looking at and tasting hairy bittercress. The shape of the poem became a Haibun - a mixture of natural history prose-poetry, with shots of haiku. The haikus - were for each time I looked out from the lane to the surrounding farms, mountains and hills. The prose-poetry was what was nearest - at my feet and beside me. Each new turn in the track brought a different viewpoint and the flora changed from short stubby turgid stars growing on dry rocks at the top, to wet ditches of bittercress at the bottom. I finished the poem when my feet hit the borderline of water at the estuary - I'd started it from above the trees. The sentence that initally began the poem hasn't made it into the final version, but the sense and power of this place hopefully has.  I have just flown to The Fortunate Isles. As the plane flew down alongside the coast, I found a new pleasure in being able to identify and name the places we passed: Corona Forestal, Punta de Teno, Los Gigantes, Montaña Amarilla, Montaña Roja. Their names are way-markers, directions: Forest Crown, The Giants, Yellow Mountain, Red Mountain. I’d felt a similar pleasure when, as an adult, I’d found a hand-drawn map and discovered the names of the fields and woods surrounding the house I’d grown up in. Descending through white to the blue-blues and brickish reds, I admired the patterns and tracks we humans make on the earth, and how, from the sky, the volcano, El Teide, looks like the lips of a mythic fish puckering at the surface. The corona forests surrounding it, are the foothills that Alexander von Humboldt trekked through to climb Mount Teide, and this is the island that Charles Darwin dreamed of coming to. An astonishing book was published three years ago: Andrea Wulf’s biography of Humboldt, The Invention of Nature. In it, she captures this place, what it meant and means to naturalists, geologists and scientists, as well as the circle of thinkers, artists and polymaths that were fusing ideas through meeting, or reading each others work: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir. Humboldt spent six days here collecting samples. A young, seasick Darwin travelled here on the Beagle, but an outbreak of cholera in England meant they weren’t permitted to go ashore. Captain Fitzroy wrote of that day: “This was a great disappointment to Mr Darwin, who had cherished a hope of visiting the peak. To see it -- to anchor and be on the point of landing, yet be obliged to turn away without the slightest prospect of beholding Teneriffe again -- was indeed to him a calamity.” In his journal, on January 6th 1832 whilst sailing into Santa Cruz, Darwin wrote: We came in sight of Teneriffe at day break…Point Naga, which we are doubling, is a rugged uninhabited mass of lofty rock with a most remarkable bold and varied outline. In drawing it you could not make a line straight. Everything has a beautiful appearance: the colours are so rich and soft, the peak has just shown itself above the clouds. It towers in the sky, twice as high as I should have dreamed of looking for it. A dense bank of clouds entirely seperates the snowy top from its rugged base. It is now about 11 oclock, and I must have another gaze at this long wished for object of my ambition.” I think if he had been able to dock, this island would have another chapter to its history, a key part in his theory of evolution and book On the Origin of Species.
I have never experienced nature as it is here: heather the size of trees, waka-waka birds that glide above you in the dark and sound more like practical jokes, fire-resident pines, blue chaffinches, plants that I’m used to seeing in pots, are forests with eagles roosting in them, and other plants seem so unreal, you’d think you were hallucinating them. All my life, I was so used to seeing wild animals in single figures, so when I swam for the first time in a volcanic reef, with a vast herd of fish, I forgot I couldn’t swear underwater and flooded my mouth with sea. There are many species where the only place they exist on earth, is here, on this or adjacent islands, in the snowy bowl of the volcano, in sub-tropical cloud, or laurel forests. They carry their place names: Teide Violet, Canary Island Pines, Tenerife Blue Chaffinch. After leaving the airport, the first thing I did was go to a local harbour and leap into the water. As I was getting changed I saw two children snorkeling. One lifted her head and said something to the other. Manta was the word the air caught - Spanish for blanket. They were following a stingray. When I was over in the spring, on my last day, I finally got to swim with one: an Eagle Ray, with its dolphin-shaped head. I had almost given up on finding them, but two rowdy men were getting in at the harbour steps, so I thought I’d wait a little longer. I turned and put my head back down and there it was, with me in its wake for the next hour. They move in the water as if blown, and seem to fly more than swim. The modern name for these seven islands is Las Islas Canarias, but I prefer the romance and abundance of the ancient name for this archipelago. It’s how I feel when here.  For the past month, I have been living in a mountain hut, on the west coast of Ireland. In the mornings, I'd sit on the front step, having my breakfast in sun, or cloud. Through the front windows you could see the steel Atlantic, three islands and waves popping against them - through the other windows: rock, bracken, mountain, field, pond and streams. The streams run down two gunnels on either side of a huge slant of rock to form one rush of water in the shape of a huge dowsing rod.
I had occasional visitors - a herd of sheeny cows, a flock of bouldering sheep, a ram (that kept me company most of the time I was there), three horses, and semi-wild mountain goats which trailed down behind the hut. All the animals were great climbers and chewers: constantly on the move, up and down between mountain and sea, walking between fields through fallen stone walls, getting separated in the fog and calling all day to their mothers. There were few fathers. The goats had one male, the cows two bull calfs, the sheep one ram and a few ram lambs. As well as the livestock, there was a grey heron, a pair of bats, hares, two wrens, goldfinches, stonechats, a family of four choughs, wheatears, hooded crows, swallows and white wagtails that danced around the cows and spring up and down on their poo like popping corn Each afternoon, I'd walk down to Trá an Phéarla (Pearl Strand), for a 5pm swim with local artists, musicians, homeopaths, geologists, guilders, gardeners, framers and farmer's daughters... One of the islets has a gulp of cormorants. From swimming level, you see all their profiles - their wings held out to the sun. This crucifixion shape gives them one of their other names - Christ bird. From up on the mountain, I could see the whole peninsula. For the first two weeks the waves became more and more swollen with each passing day and the ocean grew unrestful, frothing and twisting itself up. But for the last fortnight, it was glass and mirror. The jellyfish got plumper and more plentiful each afternoon though - in all their colours of purple, pink, tattoo blue - Compasses, Common Moons, Blues and Barrels. There were grey triggerfish too that would take a nip, so entering the water became more of a slalom than a swim. I love staying in huts: they are half out-of-doors already. Sometimes, when I'm staying in them I think of the painter, Emily Carr and her little wagon and boat. How she'd kayak off into the Canadian wilderness, then sit with the forest or seascape, not lifting a brush until she knew what the landscape wanted to tell her. This kind of listening reminds me of Thoreau. I picture him rowing Emerson downstream on his boat at dusk, or floating around on Walden Pond then returning to his house at its' edge. One of my favourite of Goethe's poems, Wanderer's Nightsong, was written in a hut on the Kickelhahn mountain. He wrote it straight onto the wall, on the night of September 6, 1780. Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. I have brought to the hut, a little collection of art postcards - by German artist, Casper David Friedrich, Emily Carr, Nikolai Alstrup and Maxfield Parrish. They were a chance selection, but somehow I see in sky, mountain and sea the same scenes that are depicted in them. I look from them to the window and back again and the view seems to me to be an invocation. The stay was part of residency with Beara Arts Festival. |
Author
Anna Selby is a naturalist and poet. 
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