Autumn Day: Burned Out Car

The day unwound
Mystery destination
Turns out to be on my doorstep
All the comfortable things
Pegging shirts on the line, the heavy rain of last night
Evidenced in rock crystal droplets on the washing line
The long grass pearled with fat raindrops.

In Black Carr Woods narrow nettle grown paths
Strewn with wild orchid
And the smell of soft surface clay
creamy yellow ochre and butter soft with the rain
Traces of hooves, tracks of paw prints and wellies.

The path widens out as we cross a foot bridge over a tree lined relic of Beeching’s axe
Onwards and deeper and steeper
Into Tong Woods and Holme Woods and the wreck of a jeep
Sits among the trees burned and stripped
A skeleton of its former self.

No fabric, no glass, no panelling remains
Its all struts and frames and sprung
Seat springs.

And in the middle of what was a car
A charcoaled limb of a tree, crooked, black, friable, gnarled
At odds with and yet part of the picture

The car so rusted it blends
Perfectly
With the russet leaves of
This shining Autumn day.

Like bones on a beach
Washed and cleaned by the sea
Until it becomes one with the sand
This car is becoming part of the forest
Camouflaged 
It is now part of the landscape.

Cell combination in my body,
A year down the line
I have carved out for myself a new place in the narrative of my life.

Like the burned out car wreck 
I’ve been laid out, ground to a halt, made to stop.

The moss grew over to hide me
While I hibernated inside a walnut shell
While I transformed into my
Post-illness self.

Angularity, stark bareness
Being unveiled and unmasked
Naked and vulnerable
Pitied and avoided, loved and cherished.

The autumn is here again
And instead of being surrounded by golden bouquets of fall flowers
I’m out in the world in the golden forest.

Out of hibernation
Out of my walnut shell.

Fairy God Mother has spun a gown of 
tigers, hummingbirds, pandas and elephants in rainbow hues
In this dress I am my new self.

Ready to stand in this autumnal forest, 
on the roof of a burned out jeep
And shout to the treetops

I am alive.

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