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NOTES FOR A PAINTING
Sunlit meadow
Hidden river singing
Road winding into the mountains.
This road with the colour of itself roams and dips from pink to purple to the brown of a hunting dog. Laid as a wish upon bucking stone, a river of hope for dry feet.
River song
Singing heart
Road into the mountains.
Hidden river
Singing heart
Road into the mountains
Each footstep song, a rhythm of itself repeating with breath and sight, the same view, the slightly changing view, the folding and unfolding view.
Sunlit meadow
Somewhere the river
Singing to itself
This meadow slope lighted with its own green, radiant aura, hovers between dark wood and bright water. A vacant illumined shimmer.
Empty mountain road
Winding beside a river
The sound of sheep
Sheep on the hillsides
Sunshine on the meadow
Empty road.
The mountain faces are copper and lead. They yearn, as mountains do, to fade to mysteries invisible, and clamber towards unreachable towering midnights.
The road and I
Following the sound of the river
Into the northern hills.
This narrow road
Wanders into the hills.
The sound of the river.
The river, a sound of laughing sunlight, uncatchable as eels. We know it by what it is not. The colour of sky and leaves and earth and rock.
Aimless we both wander,
The narrow road and I,
Into the northern hills.
Narrow road –
I do not mind where it leads
Following the river’s song.
These bare branched trees, hazel and alder and oak down there with the birches. Lines drawn across time. A language of balance and holding still. They float more certain than the solid ground.
It will be autumn soon.
The narrow road lost in leaves,
Winding beside the river.
Narrow road and I,
Forgetting where we are
Following the river into the hills.
simonhlilly 