Sophie Cooke, poet verksam i Edinburgh, har varit residensförfattare på Bengtsfors bibliotek

Start with something easy: the only rules are

you can neither own nor control it, so

start with something beautiful.

The pink dawn in your street, perhaps, or

a bird which flies in to your garden. Then

try the wilder place: the forest and the lake.

Think of this as practice: to let your being

unfold into the world, to be here with this moment,

just enjoying it.

You feel a little bit silly, but

this is normal.

Call it something else, if you want to:

aesthetics. Art and culture.

Though it’s biology and physics:

you, being here, because you want to be,

because this beauty’s calling to the beauty in your darkness.

A pinprick of light

that you don’t even have to believe in:

what has faith got to do with aesthetics, friend?

Or biology, breathing?

Look inward, then look out.

Spend as long as you like, in your street, at dawn,

or the birds in your garden: travel there, if you want to,

or – find a longer path, a road to go on.

Prepare, pack: imagine

all the situations that might happen.

Then let go.

The dawn will catch you.

It hasn’t forgotten, the mornings

on which you watched it.

Go out of the place you know

where each sight is familiar.

Let the road grow strange under your feet.

The old routine falls away,

the part you play in others’ lives,

that role: constant.

These new scenes disappear, as you walk by them.

Everything passes – sky, hill - but

the fallen leaves mount up, inside the river

that flows, clear, slow, over them.

One foot, and then the other: you are

muscle, bone, heat, and this: a pinhole

in the muscle of your heart – to let in the light,

the air you are in, from outside.

See what is here, you say.

See what is here, says your heart, in reply.

The air, between your left ear and your shoulder,

knows everything: it is listening,

cushioning your thoughts; Tell me, it says,

Tell me what is on your mind.

Your heart, by starts, begins to answer it.

it.

You live in this shelter, where all you can hear is the rain.

In here, you are hidden from the shriek of the wildwood:

no-one can see you, in this old hermitage.

The rain has cut off your smell, from the world outside,

and nor can eyes find you, in this good and clever place.

Listen, as your heartbeat keeps

drumming the necessary rhythm: hear it,

falling on the stone, the arched roof above you.

Here, the shriek still exists as a piercing tremble,

except now, this is real, as well: the deep green solitude,

and shadow, and constant sound

of the rain upon the roof -

it runs and hangs in endless tentacles of water

over the door of your man-made cave.

Bastion: place of last resort, harbour.

Everyone else who was here before

has left their mark in you:

a bone, a line of cells,

in the wall of your body.

While it was still wet,

your ancestors pressed cockle shells

into the mortar,

so that you are not quite yourself

but are in the company of all the ones

who built your shelter and decorated it:

who walked off, from here, beyond the wildwood.

It’s impossible to tell how much time passes,

within the woods of your soul.

Moss grows over your roof.

The rain will not stop.

So many leaves fall,

in so many seasons,

there is even soil between your ribs, now,

in which ferns grow, and rowan sapling.

It’s as if the forest

wants to take your humanness back

- suck you back into its easier, simpler cycle.

But you are living in a human house:

a place that humans built, for you.

For how long has it been raining like this?

For all your life.

Beyond the door, a wild cat guards

the place where you rest.

Who is that double of yours, that smiles

and talks, and moves its legs and arms?

People seem to like it,

or they don’t,

it doesn’t matter, really. Not to you,

in your ribs of rock, tucked up

somewhere behind your heart.

You can feel the awful breeze

of words and air, when it speaks.

What is it saying now? you wonder.

Where does it get all this stuff?

Saying what you think, when you don’t.

Saying what you feel, when you don’t.

It thinks it is you.

It takes you for a muse: some fleshless sprite,

a flight of fancy. Sometimes, it listens.

It writes down the words you might say,

if it would let you breathe.

But generally, it ignores you. You watch

as it lives the life you couldn’t handle.

It will not let you out. Why would it?

And you have begun to see, now,

that the season is growing very thin.

The sun, which seemed to have hung in the same position,

is westering, towards the blackthorn.

There are people, calling you.

It’s hard to spot a lynx: it lives

out of human sight, leaps between high branches,

takes other paths than your ones – stranger.

Your true desire is hidden.

It jumps across the gorge, scales the cliff,

and seems to disappear, against the rockface and the wood.

It lives in ways you find impossible.

You have to imagine it – your heart’s desiring

somewhere in the hills you’ve come to walk through.

What is it you want? You thought you knew, but

that was back there, in the town, among

your family, noise, other people. This is now.

In the silence, you know something that’s part of you

is beyond you: your will to live.

It is hunting, crossing frozen rivers,

its broad paws – webbed – patting

down upon the snow.

You don’t want its skin: no. You

want to be like it. The life it is living.

Sometimes, you get a sense of its light,

within you: knowing eyes, that glow.

What is it I feel when I walk with you?

No longer alone: I have a companion.

A comforting other, on the road.

I am alone except for you, and the world is dark.

Some houses have lights in their windows

and have not shut in their light, for themselves.

The windows glow in the winter hillside,

lit-up: small icons of homeliness in an engulfing blankness:

a lamp, on the window-sill, and plants either side of it.

The people have been good enough to leave their curtains open

and their lamps lit, for the lonely passer-by.

I keep walking, and am again in darkness, away from those windows,

the homes on the hill. It is only me, my stick, and the night and the wind.

Lake-water laps against the shore,

a gurgling clink on gravel, and the pines breathe over it.

When occasional cars come by, they curve right out, into the road,

to avoid me, although I am stood on the verge. I can hear their music.

They are here for a moment. Then gone.

Warehouses stand silent, out on the peninsula. I pass them,

and their softly buzzing streetlights beneath the trees.

Slim birch trunks: the legs of a ghostly flock of gigantic storks,

their bodies hidden in the darkness above me,

their wings ruffling in between the stars,

readying for a migration: they will slide their webbed roots out

from their gravelly nooks between the rocks.

There are fractions of light on the water. It breaks and shimmers

but holds its pattern, its pointing back to its source.

There are so many ways you could go. You are at the edge

of human habitation – beyond the fire station

and the shop, you see it: the overgrown verge looks trodden,

a sort of space, so you try it. Beyond: there’s a marking. Someone

has come and signposted the way: so you can go, with no map,

and not become lost on the hill.

The markings lead you through the woody scrub,

around the edges of the bog.

Sometimes, the path vanishes: the stone beneath you

has risen up, and become it – a broad table-top,

held up to the sky, grey rock with wrinkles in which

pine needles and fallen snow have gathered.

A crossing you stop on, because

it feels like a celebration, this sudden expanding

and opening, of more-than-enough, inside the wood.

Smaller paths lead off, sideways: from the fringes,

the paths of the roe deer.

Sometimes it’s good to explore these narrow tracks

in blueberry bush and heather -

to find the point where they peter out

into tall grass – yellowed – and hanging curtains of birch

or the barrier of spruce and fir, through which you can not pass:

too big and clumsy to go further than this closed door,

but small enough to have come here,

to walk at least part of the animal way – even if

the path that is meant for you is the human one:

wider, leading always on, promising

to return you to a place you can be at home in.

From here, I am not here: all that is,

is the air that hangs between

the shadowed branches’ shifting colours:

orange sheen of the final wall of beech,

yellow pennies of the birch – a last hurrah:

the coins a bride and groom once threw to us

outside the church – the silent stillness, now.

The almost-emptied frame of what will be:

the bones we have to live with – winter trees -

and evergreen towers, fringing: pine.

I am the frozen strawberry leaf

and twisting of the rock-face – the cliff

for which my path has twisted – and am

my own warm heart, beating in its winter frame:

the small-leaved heather, and the far-off geese,

sending memories through the lichen of my being.

We will come through whatever comes, they say.

One foot, and then the other,

on the side of the mountain.

We are at the farthest point. Summer’s been flung
behind this endless grey. This
edge of the out-breath lives by the moon, and short days
in which to walk. Too cold to sleep out: so
you find your paths circumscribed, set about
with practical limits. There’s more to plan for, now. But
in the crook of the dark days’ elbow,
the lake ice glows: thick, white,
almost a light source. When else
can a barrier become your roadway?
The distant forest
is suddenly reachable.
Put your skates on. Put
one foot in front of the other.
Tomorrow - a beginning, the smallest step
of the year’s long in-breath. Summer’s trails
lie waiting, and all the greenness that will come,
underneath this world of snow.

In the woods, three suns shine: the true one’s split in two

by a pine-trunk, blazing either side of this;

the whole sun’s reflected, in another angle -

glancing up from the marsh-pool: a sun on the same level as you,

in a tinier forest of sphagnum moss and fern that brinks the water:

liquid image of the world, lain down, complete with tree-tops.

Three suns shine: none of them the true one – a portion, or a version – but

there’s comfort in seeing the sun, doubling itself,

by touching the light of fire to water,

as a candle lights a candle in the darkness.

Your life blooms in your skull: you are a candle.

The flame dances in you, even when you turn

and seem to shut the light off – or you take a different path -

streak off, a comet. Once meeting, we are never apart.

We are never unknown, though we try to unknow ourselves.

There is no hiding from what you were,

from what is your true nature: to be a vessel. You are

like water, that can’t help but reflect the fiery sun above it;

and your life a string, on which new wax gathers,

ready for the night’s fall.

Always the light in your window

spells out that you’re familiar.

If I have set off wrong, then set me straight.

Take me to the well. Lead me by my feet.

Has some mischievous person changed the signs?

Did I lose a turn-off? Maybe, though I am on a path I know,

it is the wrong one. I’m out of signal on my phone.

Even if I knew how to read it, there are clouds across the sky,

the signs I’d find there.

But I have my feet.

Go back, they say. There’s something you have missed.

Somewhere in the woods, the well is listening.

You retrace your steps: around, around. You can not find it.

Home-blind. There are things you do not notice,

being too familiar with their clothing:

you presume, you accept, you trust and believe

in things you shouldn’t. These shapes of leaves

are not what they seem to be, and cover what is real -

the old, overgrown way that leads to the well,

by the hermitage.

One foot, and then the other.

Your heartbeat, and this: the path,

the slowly changing light, the slowly changing trees

around you. In, and in, each step.

Were you good at that game, as a kid,

where you were shown little things on a tray,

and had to remember what was there, in the beginning,

so you could notice, each round, which thing had gone missing?

A thimble, the nail scissors. What is it

that has gone missing from you? And is this

where you have hidden it?

The water in the well is dark as the shadows surrounding it.

Who knows what has been thrown in here, to hide it or end it?

You will choose how much to bring up. You have a plastic bucket,

a length of nylon.

You can hear the constant heart-beat of water:

a waterfall, in a world of green moss.

It is not yet night-fall.