& aching brood of afternoon lightens late & the youngwood rings tinny with voices of coaltit & goldcrest a line of starlings passes messages up & down itself black smoke issues behind the ridge & a diesel engine deepens sound & fades

& the sun inconstant, coming & going in patternless interludes - rainbows blaze & fade above patrols of grey heron - & as it steadies to leave picks out corvids wheeling to roost

smokestained, 2 nights after full, unmoved by friday night fireworks

Grasmere today on student field trip - dwelling perpectives & 'taskscapes' - & managed to disappear for 10 to buy Ghosts of the Farm @nicolawriting.bsky.social from @samreadbookseller.bsky.social - winding back towards M6 & the weekend...

& everything post-storm is strange: marbled skies & milky floodgrounds: a great white egret (so rare here) apppears & is gone, landmarks mirror & seabirds crowd submerged pasture - grey herons everywhere so long as you tilt your head

afternoon meeting online - sudden whistling call & you turn off your camera to grab a camera: ked kite looking right in at you

& no moon only the rare strata of light pollution - conditions need to be exact for the ghost of a small town to churn as breath on the horizon

& lash of rain rising in the seams of soil all day (everything shivers in a warm wind): 'depleted airmass', a weatherapp says, scraps & tatters of hurricane Melissa

gap in the thorn hedge the blue of a storm cloud ripens into sloes

All Souls. birchleaves roll in the breeze animate as mice, corvids standing sentinel to ensure the darktime does its work thoroughly (everything glows & recedes at once). you leave the woods to blackbirds & tawny owls, take the lane south towards a white & moonless sky

November. Between a star & a satellite a red kite quarters, & so do you. Golden hour filters through the lane. Burnished chaffinches dot the silo as sun sets & the air chills.

good halloween to you folks, whatever you do with it

& wave of lashing rain as light decays, blackbirds dinking & a wren tuts in the hawthorn (brief silhouette crosses the lamp that burns all night above the door of an empty house); on a night to be in it is good to be out, & return to a candle lit in the window

& morning glowers, as well it might

& yr neighbour's fire sits in its nest of soft ashfeather & seems a day premature, pulsing its last at dusk to mark nothing - & 2 fields over the weak tealights of a quad make downhill under tartan trees

& escape the screen briefly towards sunset in the pouring rain but light pours too & skies are cloudpiled & blue due south moon sharp & high & clear

& all the road home (slow slalom of greasy leaves & slick mud shed by tractors), moon on your right in full sail: sinking in troughs of hill & cresting piled cloud over fields, bruised sky of lastlight, night fully down in the woods

lateafternoon as the sun left - 10 minutes between brightsky & darkling thrush (30 mins of light will seep away this week), woodcock in headlights in the lane

& into the dark half - see off the sun behind hills before 17.00 & the cold wind ripping over, sweet smell of mulch & puddles collage work of the breeze

trip to the smoke & took in Andy Goldsworthy 50 year exhibition - so strange & provoking to find the familiar - barbed wire & fallen oak - indoors, & movements of sheep around salt-lick rendering winter sun

& last night running on summer time, november's moon setting to save power

& all afternoon (sun clouded lunar) waves of fieldfares passing, clucking & loud & social, pause in the bare claws of the lowfield's ash, roost & rest & move on as a wave last light

& out at corvid hour (riverine, disciplined wavering) - dark rising where canopy is right-angled silagewagon height; turn back towards stub of chimney that is yours for now: over the river a tractor strikes sandstone, clanging in the flatcalm

& grubby of greasy rain & sullen sky but deep decay has its own colour, & nourishment in the clucking of newly-arrived fieldfares: the day darkens, the day provides its own light

& back lateafternoon as season deepens: through the windscreen fieldfares in the oaks in the lane, 2 migrations cross

early today all a strandline, watching curlew & seagoing wigeon, the morning a part-hauled boat, ready to set out

north & arrive time of the long shadows - summer's barley gone & a firth loud with waders as sun & tide recede

all the oil in their feathers, wingtips scrape & nick the metal sky: pinkfeet

& back the copper lanes after dark, latheshavings of leaves that wind has planed down & swept to the edges

& all week redwings after dark seeping over & tonight the vile, lusty burping of a fallow buck: steam of rank breath implied in the sound

& out to chase last greywater light, muckspreader under the hill tilting & turning its own lozenge of light & at yr feet small buttercup faces open, heavy sky; clenched & blocky across the field buzzard works at carrion, to the SW comms array: stoic efficiency

& the corvid river shakk & roil at dusk again, empty farmhouse pops security light for nobody (local rumours on it & yr home raise eyebrows), the strung infrastucture attempts a whistle & fails, the autumn smell of rank old leather as in the dry shit is spread & layered & spread

& yr beam finds no true: the gates lie open & each wednesday fewer sheep as they go to market (you swing the autumn lamp into canopy & its brittle crisping): sudden rawrk of heron & redwing seep, concentrated thought of migration

& sudden fall of temperature soon as sun goes, sky shocks indigo in aftermath & last weekend's stormwaters driven overground

afternoon deep in woods, in the patch & scatter of light & dark - goldfinches & long tailed tits, treecreepers & woodpeckers all avoiding the camera to glitch into dapple - haze to the horizon, sky above cloudless & clear

out to greet the newly returned barnacle geese, present in number (1 leucistic member) - right to the horizon, wavering in heathaze, line upon line of geese (mostly pink footed)

& the sky shows what you know - how waves behave, how tide moves - & all you do not, off-world & on, not just a moon obscured, but simulation of galaxies

& now it is all lights - last rounds at moonrise & the hills ping dusk - then the other lights, imagining themselves immune: the lampers [redacted]

& in the small, rusting, rowan a spider spparently in open sky, a web so fine nothing can see it - work of balanced tension, infrastructure of autumn

& you find fullmoon eventually - cowl of cloud streaming off - slanting fast into dark

& the longroad open in exhale of water, SW clear & in want of stars - but NE & E a rug of cloud, fullmoon slight & partial (perhaps visible later & higher), you chase 2 grown lambs back through broken wire

& the moon (1 night from full) climbs out & into cloudbank, autumn skies do slow dusk drama (shotguns are rapping, all knuckle on bartop) & rubbery engines of pheasants: there is a thrush decaying to pixels & a heron you mistake for a kite; guns pause, tawny owls open up

& the river smells of the hills this early-autumn sunday time a shift is building this acorn mast year scattered where stormfloods flattened a bed dipper in shallow rapids ducks & dives with confidence

& stuttering bands of rain & wind - in breaks sound of chainsaws - glint of cars beetling over brash, bird neighbours glean wreckage (chaffinch, dunnock, house sparrow) #birds

& late afternoon the storm swept in, shotblast rain & buffeting, shoulderbarge wind (roadsides piled with torn timber an hour in, river topping & windows collaged with soft shrapnel of leaflitter)

& then coming back a workglove ripples - underneath a half-asleep toad bucks again & settles & you cover them over & leave them to it (night of warm & howling wind & wires singing, of small hare that bounces in your headlight, of sough & whoosh of rusting branches)

& october elbows in with dreich slouch, rim of the quarry a dryedge of scab & the usual hornbeam ablaze, the hill pushed back & acorns split by wheels in the lane - jackdaws figuring roost & pheasants glaiketly wandering, uneducated, unsure, lost

& last of September, maize being harvested over the river - 1st year they have sown it there - take it in as it pours of rain, back at nightfall to squelch & skid, bare khaki of land