Two dunnocks flutter across the path like leaves on the wind. My dog immediately tunes in. The sunset is Californian, an Ed Ruscha ombré, the hills of Dundry dusty blue so that they are not a real place at all, only what a painting makes a place to be. And the mackerel sky is the memory of other mackerel skies. It's the impression of a sky so that you almost have to laugh at it. Some yesterdays ago the dog and I unseated a snipe from the flooded meadow in stoke park. My first snipe. Today the blue haze of midnight noon in the filtering trees twinges like a poked cloak letting light in here, a dust moat there. Hand on tree I speak to the woods skimming words from the encrusted top of my mind – the bark is nobbly, impossibly larger than my hand even on this modest tree – the tree talks through the sky and soil. I attach at the middle, a hand into that dark furnace of slow silence. I like to consider all the ways in which we don't know we can connect, all the perceptions in which we're unpracticed. Deep in the woods, deep in our minds, bodies, souls. All the words we don't waste for fear of... stupidity, folly, pride, rationality. So here I am talking to the heart of the woods. And then. I happened to be looking and you passed by, swish and flick, crunch of twig, squelch of mud and you were gone. A memory of yesterday, a thought of tomorrow. Now, now.