A Time of Autumn Water

My mind has been a swamp all day. Sentences swam out of reach. Words dissolved on impact with my tongue. I needed to be sharp and focussed. Instead I spent the day feeling leaden and bogged down. I have found myself lost so often recently. I am turned around. I spend my days in a place where I do not speak the right language. Sometimes, like today, it is so disorienting I despair.

I went for a walk. If my brain wasn’t going where I wanted it to, at least my legs could take me somewhere. I let the familiarity of the Thames Path soothe me. I needed the comforting sound of the river drumming alongside me and the measured tread of my feet reminding me that I knew how to get home, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel that way in my head.

I love that the clocks have changed. I like the mystery that the darkness brings to familiar places. The rain slicks the streets and sometimes it can be hard to tell the river from the road. Black ribbons out, snaking between houses, curving in loops, licking stone and cutting through earth. The dark surface of the water in the marina is a scrying mirror, turning reflection into prediction. Under the still water, the cormorants glide like sculptures freeing themselves from stone. Solid shifts to liquid, liquid to solid. Everything swims in and out of focus.

The heat had parched the streets, cracking things open. The smell of rotting rubbish cut with dust became the signature of the dying days of summer. Now everything smells of water and the warm, autumnal rot of dying leaves. They mass on pavements, imprinting themselves onto concrete, splashing flames onto black and grey, burnished by the pressure of impatient feet. Scarlet creepers tumble down the warm, solid orange of old bricks. Sprays of berries demand notice, punctuating trees and hedges, clamouring bright. The wet mops of hydrangea heads turn to damp paper, weighed down by the mass of water falling from the sky. Everything is falling earthward, down towards the pull of winter.

Squirrels mass in the parks, their muscular legs pumping double time as they haul conkers. Damp pigeons squat on railings and a crow, blown in from the river, steadies itself against a gust of wind, rolling its neck like a boxer readying himself for another bout in the ring. Nature is pressed by need on days like these. There is much to be done and so little time to do it.

Today the rain was a poem. The haiku of the tree branches, scintillating in jewel drips, tip tilting their way to earth. Headlights streaking their warning down long, wet roads. Streetlights haloing into mist, smirring reality at the edges. The warm, yellow thumbprints of a thousand wet office blocks making a child’s painting of the skyline. Each bleeds into each in the warm, wet darkness.

Reality is dissolving, time is running in rivers. Light shivers. Raindrops gather on my eyelashes, blinking their refractions across my face and I dissolve too.