Encounter
By Philip Rösel Baker
July 15, 2024
July 15, 2024
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This evening, the leaves changed,
from curling copper, yellow-flecked verdigris and flame, to greys and blacks, the gathering dusk draining them of colour. The brusque drop in temperature, once the sun had gone, gave the breeze a slight bite, and I rode the bike a little harder through drowsing woods - a low-key warning, that gloves would soon be the norm again on my homeward ride. And as I rode, the moon rose - an imperfect circle, - a potter's plate, a second, rejected - freed to flit among the passing trees, to play hide and seek without raising a creak from the groping branches. Not long ago, my ride had been through the heady musk of summer dusks. Moss, dried out on brittle bark, the humid breath - of full-veined leaves in semi-dark cross-weaves of branches – shared, when each tree mixed its fragrance with its neighbours’. Shy bee orchids had raised their heads along the woodland‘s open edge, where purple vetch had left them space, but in among the crowd of trees the rich moist ground gave up its heat, the leaf-mould’s bittersweet fermented odour softly vented, to infuse the air with one wild, potent communal scent, which now was lost. Zigzag clover, dotted mauve, in places where the ancient wood allowed the sun to enter briefly, now had disappeared. Grass vetchling‘s crimson flowers had vanished even earlier from borders where the strongest trees stood firm against the coming storms - field maple, hazel - ash, that dieback spores, their deadly diamond lesions, spreading blindly through the East, had somehow failed to find. Now the trees, stood awkward, already losing leaves, estranged along the narrow lane, as if embarassed - each one focussed on its roots, painfully aware of the change in the evening air, as if they felt slightly foolish, like people once acquainted, who'd now forgotten each others' names but did not like to admit it. Human metaphor, of course - nothing more, than a puny attempt to understand the realities of trees - themselves not human. Soon be riding in the dark I whispered to myself, marking the date, standing on pedals to maintain my rate of climb through the spinney, legs growing heavy with the creep of autumn. Suddenly in my cycle beam - as yet weak in the twilight - an eye’s gleam, a curve of rump, coalesced to the shape of a full-grown deer, stock still, no smell of fear, no turn-tail flinch, considering me calmly, motionless, at the border between lane and leaf, between trunk-cast shadows, and the bare, probing, critical stare of my wandering cycle beam. I flicked it off, leaving us veiled in dim moon-grey. I approached slowing, aware how loud the drum of my tyres on the tarmac must sound to ears attuned to the stealthy brush of the stalker’s shoe on ground ivy. It let me come – somehow, keeping my balance - on wheels that by now were hardly turning. Looked me in the eyes, as if the silence of ferns on the verge, the leaves barely moving, the drifting moon in a glaze of clouds, were holding us both in a moment bounded only by breathing, nostrils flared but scarcely aware of the quivering air entering, leaving. It looked me in the eyes, as if knowing me from deep. As if the words I see you passed soundlessly between us, as if we shared a kind of sleep, but both were wild-awake, listening acutely, with respect, only to each other. Then, as the closing distance grew palpably electric, I sensed my wheels, my form above them, crossed an unseen boundary. I sensed a tensing in my limbs, mirrored by a tension in the stance of my companion. Its shape became uneasy - then it dropped its gaze and turned, unhurried, fading gently into grey between the nameless trees, to leaf-enfolding darkness. We live by words, by naming things. This is how we find our way. This is how we protect ourselves, keep ourselves grounded. But in the momentary leap, beyond words, seeing from deep - there, and only there lies the real encounter. |
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Philip Rösel Baker is an Anglo-German poet living under dark night skies in a remote hamlet in East Anglia, UK. He reads and performs his poems regularly at the Soapbox sessions in Ipswich, Suffolk. His poetry has been published in various newspapers, magazines and anthologies in the UK and US - most recently in On a Knife Edge, a climate change collection published jointly by Suffolk Poetry Society and the Lettering Arts Trust, and Water (Michigan State University Libraries Short Édition). In 2022 he won the George Crabbe Poetry Prize in the UK. He has been long-listed for the International Erbacce Prize, won a finalist award for the US Fischer Prize and this year received honorary mention in the Fish Poetry Prize in Ireland, judged by Billy Collins.
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Author’s Note:
I have a 5 mile cycle ride from our little country railway station (end of the line) along winding narrow lanes to get home. In one sense this poem is simply an account of what happened one evening as I rode through the woods, but in another it addresses the insufficiency of the names and language we humans rely on so much of the time. Animals, as far as we know, don’t have words, but they communicate in other ways, ways that we can sometimes understand intuitively because we too are animals. That evening something passed between us that was too deep for words, and yet it was - paradoxically - something I had to write about afterwards in order to fully understand it.