Mark Rutter’s poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, most recently Aswirl, Mercurius, Petrichor Journal, and The PoPoGrou Anthology. His most recent collections/pamphlets are: simple cells (inkCONCRETE) and Sky-Burial (Coast to Coast to Coast). He is also an artist and printer. Mark grew up in the Midlands and North of England, but lived in a trailer in the Maine woods during the 1990s, and still returns there each summer.
Tapestry
Tapestry
Mist rising from frozen bracken
at the field’s edge
from bones of heather
and the medieval cruelty
of gorse
rising among
ghost-silhouettes of
ponies drifting in the last
sunlight
so that the past rises
too
the far distant past beyond all memory
hangs its tapestry in the fog
its moth-eaten cloth the light
almost shines through
and
we see the people of the past
depicted there
moving slowly like
twists of mist over
the close-cropped heather and the bones
of burned gorse
© Mark Rutter
The Perseids
Perseids: an annual meteor shower which reaches its peak around 12 August.
To return to a place after 11 months is to keep finding messages from yourself. I had forgotten many of the preparations we made at the end of last summer: two small canvases, undercoated for painting sketches, sitting upright on a bookshelf; a bookmark halfway through The Tokyo-Montana Express by Richard Brautigan; a set of wood-engraving and lino-cutting tools; handmade paper cut and torn to the right size for printing. Most ingeniously, this bag made of pink webbing hanging from the kitchen ceiling, and within it two charcoal water filters, left there to dry out of reach of mice. The nuts are screwed lightly to the end of each one, so that it is ready for the filter to be assembled in an instant. Who is this old self, so far seeing and full of preparations for their future return?
*
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, the holiday home, the dacha, is both origin and destination. The film opens with a long slow shot of the pond before the house of the main character, Kris, or rather his father’s dacha outside the city. The film will return here at the end, only then the dacha will be the one created out of Kris’s memory by the sentient, telepathic ocean which covers the distant planet. Orbiting Solaris in the space station, Kris dreams of his old life on Earth, and the phantoms of his past begin to materialise in his room while he sleeps. When he wakes, he finds his dead wife watching over him. In the final scene, is Kris content in this third place, the dacha reborn on a distant world, his dead father awaiting him at the doorway to the past?
*
The holiday home is of course associated with wealth. But what if your dacha is a second-hand 1978 trailer in the woods, one which was your home for a decade? What happens to you when you live between two familiar places, both lived in rather than visited, both a part of you rather than one being home and the other a brief annual adventure among strangers? As I sit here looking out of the window at the pines and maples which fringe the clearing, they are simultaneously present and emerging out of the past. Are there some secrets of the psyche which can only be discerned in the experience of displacement, the sense that part of your life is always going-on elsewhere?
*
This divided heart. This soul woven of two worlds.
*
Because you can never return to the same place you can never return. But if you spend enough time in a place it works its magic on you, it becomes a part of you whether you wish it or not. I stood on the porch and looked at the stars in the misty sky, the grasshoppers and crickets singing the loudest I’ve heard in years – and so much time came back to me, stretching back half of my life.
*
Shelves weighed down by books. Paintings and prints on the walls. Brightly coloured rugs. A guitar leaning in a corner. A witches’ broom. Candles. Vinyl records.
*
In the second part of To the Lighthouse we witness the Great War from the vantage of the empty holiday home, abandoned by the summer visitors, many of whom would die in the trenches. Sounds of distant sea battles intrude upon the sifting of dust from the rafters, shake the spiderwebs in window corners. Time passes and light crosses the deserted rooms haunted by the war, as if the house is the only still point, the only constant. And what of those who survived? When they returned, did they meet themselves on a creaking stairway, or in the slow strobe of the lighthouse beam?
*
The time of departure looms like a death. We will leave behind ghosts of ourselves which will haunt us next summer. Hidden in an unmarked box we find a roadmap, a detailed map of the city and the airport.
*
Coyote cries fade on the night air… shooting stars.
© Mark Rutter