Night garden

10pm. Plaintive and persistent miaowing. Projected onto the neighbour's fence by the dull orange glare of the streetlamp, the silhouette of a cat, spookily distorted. Too dark to see the actual animal.

Midnight

The words won't come. Much is happening and very little of it translates to a blog post. Thoughts come and go, drift and evaporate. Looking back I see that August has been the month in each of the past two years that I've taken a blog break. Hmmm.

****

In the middle of the night, last night, I woke up. Power cut. No habitual shadows on the wall from the street light. I reach for the bedside lamp. Click. Nothing. No World Service murmering by my left ear. I shuffle to the window and look out over a sea of total, unaccustomed dark.

****

Leading onto a middle-of-the-night poem by Ted Hughes. Out of season, but who cares. I've only recently discovered this and I absolutely love it, the symbolism, the physicality of the description of a very non-physical event.


The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes