Learning to WalkBy Jodie Dalgleish
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I watch your boots press their downwards force into the dirt,
and its deep forest litter. I see their compression of it;
how a heel strikes the distinct trace of your weight, in humus,
and how it rebounds, as if decomposing upwards, our long
hard-pressed relations coming back on up, to the arch
as the heft of the body moves itself, onto its toes,
from the great toe, to the second, to the third, and so on:
the body’s lift, to the ‘toe-off,’ and the load of the ‘stance
phase’ of the gait to be perambulated over ground. How the
valley has loft itself into the strata of schistose rock—time
in foliated, metamorphic rock, up-ended into its mineral
sheaths, sheared along our escarpment: the grand cuts
of orange sericite, green ottrelite, and the sandstone that
has been veined in quartzite, coming up tight and tipped
to the course of our feet. How the heel lifts and is swung
by the foot, in a pendulum, from the hip, to the plant
of the reciprocal leg’s pendular pivot; it’s like pole-vaulting
off one reiterative stake to the next while the rolling torque
of each hip couples the fall of an arc with the rise of an arc:
how our centre is carried undulately in the constantly, re-
directional, work of our ‘step-to-step transitions.’ How the
lungs fill to the signals of the receptors in our blood, telling us
how deeply we need to breathe with effort, in the swell
of the belly: sensors at the arterial bifurcation of the throat,
and on the heart’s aortic arch, rounding our abdomens out
to the thoracic cavity’s influx of air. Where there’s a view
from the top of our rock-range spur, out over the land’s hook
of the river; its meander that rings us, always, into the setting
of its alluvial settling—our hands out, over the rail,
evidencing the way all the ridges arrow their way into that
boucle and its almost-island of stone-housed tracts of land.
Stood with the last details of the valley’s walls, it’s the ‘light touch
contact’ of the index finger that will take us back down, trailing
through bracken, and heather: that slight ‘shear force’ at the
tip of the ‘tactile stimulations of the hand’, that’s enough
to maintain ‘postural control,’ to keep our bodies’ ‘equilibrate sway’
in play. There’s how rhizomatous bracken succeeded the first
forest ferns and how the perennial of heather (perhaps) branched
from its seeded ones and flowered the first woodlands from which
angiosperms then bloomed; how a bracken fern’s apical blade (‘frond’)
has unfurled its ‘crozier’ (tip) and is, fractally, ‘tri-pinnate’—from the ‘rachis’
(stem) of the blade to the ‘pinna’, pinna to ‘pinnule’, pinnule to ‘pinnulet’;
with ‘sori’ that trace the lobed divisions of each subleaflet’s margins.
Saying, how heather extends apically too, in branches of leading long shoots
that branch into short shoots, and leading long shoots that branch into both
short shoots and leading long shoots, making the ‘hemispherical’ shrub
with its concentrically radial flower—criss-crossed from two whorls
of leaf bracts to one darker, mauve, petal-like ‘calyx’, to the inside lighter, pink,
‘corolla’ of the ‘perianth’ (the outer part of the ‘flower’); how, in a cross-section,
we’d see the way its particular nectary sits down below the ‘fruiting’ bulb to
sequester the bell-like corolla of the sequential flower. How the shrub enters
dormancy with clusters of (end-of-season) short shoots that break to long-
leading flowering shoots, and previous, surviving, long shoots might bloom
progressively, downwards; back from the waymarked rim of the ‘Roche à
Sept Heures’ where, at 7 AM in the morning, the sun hits the end of our
escarpment, tossing out the éclairant quartz-rich siliceous rock, in a
vitreous éclat of the valley’s crystal: scene of its trailed surface struck
out slab-like; light salvo, under our feet.
Variation of original published in Shearsman 125 & 126, Winter 2020/2021.
and its deep forest litter. I see their compression of it;
how a heel strikes the distinct trace of your weight, in humus,
and how it rebounds, as if decomposing upwards, our long
hard-pressed relations coming back on up, to the arch
as the heft of the body moves itself, onto its toes,
from the great toe, to the second, to the third, and so on:
the body’s lift, to the ‘toe-off,’ and the load of the ‘stance
phase’ of the gait to be perambulated over ground. How the
valley has loft itself into the strata of schistose rock—time
in foliated, metamorphic rock, up-ended into its mineral
sheaths, sheared along our escarpment: the grand cuts
of orange sericite, green ottrelite, and the sandstone that
has been veined in quartzite, coming up tight and tipped
to the course of our feet. How the heel lifts and is swung
by the foot, in a pendulum, from the hip, to the plant
of the reciprocal leg’s pendular pivot; it’s like pole-vaulting
off one reiterative stake to the next while the rolling torque
of each hip couples the fall of an arc with the rise of an arc:
how our centre is carried undulately in the constantly, re-
directional, work of our ‘step-to-step transitions.’ How the
lungs fill to the signals of the receptors in our blood, telling us
how deeply we need to breathe with effort, in the swell
of the belly: sensors at the arterial bifurcation of the throat,
and on the heart’s aortic arch, rounding our abdomens out
to the thoracic cavity’s influx of air. Where there’s a view
from the top of our rock-range spur, out over the land’s hook
of the river; its meander that rings us, always, into the setting
of its alluvial settling—our hands out, over the rail,
evidencing the way all the ridges arrow their way into that
boucle and its almost-island of stone-housed tracts of land.
Stood with the last details of the valley’s walls, it’s the ‘light touch
contact’ of the index finger that will take us back down, trailing
through bracken, and heather: that slight ‘shear force’ at the
tip of the ‘tactile stimulations of the hand’, that’s enough
to maintain ‘postural control,’ to keep our bodies’ ‘equilibrate sway’
in play. There’s how rhizomatous bracken succeeded the first
forest ferns and how the perennial of heather (perhaps) branched
from its seeded ones and flowered the first woodlands from which
angiosperms then bloomed; how a bracken fern’s apical blade (‘frond’)
has unfurled its ‘crozier’ (tip) and is, fractally, ‘tri-pinnate’—from the ‘rachis’
(stem) of the blade to the ‘pinna’, pinna to ‘pinnule’, pinnule to ‘pinnulet’;
with ‘sori’ that trace the lobed divisions of each subleaflet’s margins.
Saying, how heather extends apically too, in branches of leading long shoots
that branch into short shoots, and leading long shoots that branch into both
short shoots and leading long shoots, making the ‘hemispherical’ shrub
with its concentrically radial flower—criss-crossed from two whorls
of leaf bracts to one darker, mauve, petal-like ‘calyx’, to the inside lighter, pink,
‘corolla’ of the ‘perianth’ (the outer part of the ‘flower’); how, in a cross-section,
we’d see the way its particular nectary sits down below the ‘fruiting’ bulb to
sequester the bell-like corolla of the sequential flower. How the shrub enters
dormancy with clusters of (end-of-season) short shoots that break to long-
leading flowering shoots, and previous, surviving, long shoots might bloom
progressively, downwards; back from the waymarked rim of the ‘Roche à
Sept Heures’ where, at 7 AM in the morning, the sun hits the end of our
escarpment, tossing out the éclairant quartz-rich siliceous rock, in a
vitreous éclat of the valley’s crystal: scene of its trailed surface struck
out slab-like; light salvo, under our feet.
Variation of original published in Shearsman 125 & 126, Winter 2020/2021.
Jodie Dalgleish is an itinerant writer, curator and sound artist living in Luxembourg. After ten years of creating exhibitions for New Zealand's Art Museums, she is now focused on exploring the possibilities and constraints of language, especially as it (hopefully) relates to lived, sensorial, experience. Moving between countries (NZ; U.S.A; France; Italy; and Luxembourg), has been germane to her (multilingual) practice. Most recently, her poems have been published in Landfall (NZ); Shearsman Magazine (UK); Salzburg Poetry Review (Austria); and Les Cahiers Luxembourgeois.