An Alphabets’-Lattice | Mark Goodwin

At a certain time of the day the jackdaws fly over, although you couldn’t set your clock by them. I can’t be sure, but I reckon it is the light that they feel, as by degrees day changes its frequencies towards night’s. Suddenly the sky is spotted with jacks’ calls, and the odd jackdaw figure being tugged towards favourite willows … and then not much later a slightly dimmer sky is spattered with jack-jacks & dark bird-glyphs constellated in flow towards roost …

An evening or two ago, I decided to set up my field-recorder in the heart of Jackdawia – a nation-less place amongst old water-filled gravel pits, and beneath tall willows. As I arrived the odd jack sparked in the sky as a blackbird chinked and a wren’s hot sonic silver shot through twigs … the long willow limbs were purple-black and blackening against the sky’s energy-fade … the city-rim noises of by-pass cars and the general whirr of the city’s mass fractured into slippery see-through sounds as the entangling alphabets of the trees’ branches – the lattice of cruxes & twig-scripts – re-said some world … and then the jacks, and the crows too, their throats took something from the air and gave something else back … but what it was these creatures were giving, and to what or who … suddenly exquisitely impossible …

My digital field-recorder on its silvery-legged tripod in the dark, the illuminated square of its interface lonely below the blackening willows & the twig-clots of crows’ nests. I’ve got my ears, on the side of my head, I put my fingers up to them, I can feel them … and yet that technological appendage, the field-recorder just over there, as I stand here surrounded by whirling bird-voice & crossed-crisses of tree-letters from languages not imagined yet, that prosthetic ear almost, even though I’m not touching it, that grammar-changer, that algorithm-driven gleaner of sonic traces … it changes the way I feel with my ears. Degrees of direction explode slowly through degrees of sound, each jack or caw sits its noise on a fibre of distance …

It is actually almost frightening. In fact it is frightening, so I keep my mind on my feet, the pressure of Earth pushing up towards me, just to remind me I’m not radio waves and that I have a core of bones, and that I’m standing on a planet and not being sucked out into space … because now the roost is at climax, the smithereens-cackle around me has taken the dark now and compressed it and exploded it at once, the now, the now purple-black entangled letters of the trees & countless fragments of voices from all-times-gone-&-to-come … all this now has taken dark’s noise and remade it so that the outside of my mind is the same as the inside … unbounded, borderless … except for my feet, I keep my feet, keep them, I don’t let them go, I keep them planted … for if I forget to stand on this ground here then all this utterly-foreign-deeply-familiar eternally migratory creaturely un-language that I love as much as I fear, this burn of noise will not become … this burn of noise will not become sound … and sound’s pattern will not become … will not become words …

Photographs by Nikki Clayton. Listen to Mark Goodwin’s field recordings of jackdaws & crows at roost, Watermead Park, Leicestershire, England, January 2017:

 

Mark Goodwin appears at the StAnza Poetry Festival (St Andrews, Fife) on Friday 3 March; click here for more details. His fourth poetry collection, Steps (Longbarrow Press, 2014), explores themes of climbing, walking and balancing. Click here to visit the Steps microsite for extracts, essays and audio recordings. You can also order the hardback via PayPal below:

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