“Crease in the snowy field / of evening within us,” writes the American poet Michael Palmer in Crease (from Company of Moths). Not much snow has stuck here yet. There is more snow in the hills to the south-west and the plain to the north.
These fields, called The Cutlins, are white with frost. The crease across the field may be the remains of a ditch, a hedge, a track, a ridge and furrow from centuries past that leaves a trace, a line of shadow through whitened space, a place of evening twilight between things, stuck there under the weight of cold air.
The glow of a sodium lamp can be seen through trees on the lane, as if evening lies at one end of the crease and leaks along it, through the field from dark woods at the top.
In this field, each sheep has a red dot on its back. They move around like oblivious victims of a mass shooting incident. Shotguns fire in the distance; somewhere there will be blood on the frost, but here the cold takes the warm breath of animals away: zombie sheep; highland cattle with the remains of last year’s meadows stuck in their hair; dogs sniff-reading fox marks on crystal-topped fenceposts; and us, watching.
The wood at the far end of the field is at the edge of Standhill limestone quarry and kilns abandoned a century ago. Tall ash, lagged in ivy, rise into a grey sky with a flash of blue behind it. Standhill is a reef, where tides of time and weather snag, a place of rack and ruin.
A raven kronks from high branches and, below, hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel crowd along the margin between wood and field, tipped with frosty emulsion. Bramblings seek bitter seeds; other birds pace their watch across iron turf or stare from the black scaffolding of field oaks and limes.
A crease draws across the cold hard laundry of the fields; it runs through us, too, gathering a windrow of snowy stuff from these wintery impressions we see; lost memories drifting from Palmer’s “heap of photographs”.
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