Isles of Apples: Chestnut Petal: White Stag

Old apple orchard at the base of Glastonbury tor

What follows is a gathering of impressions come up from the old green mounds of Somerset and Devon between the full moon of Easter, and this recent full moon of May, after just having moved into a new home at the base of an ancient hill. Bits of poetry, travelogue, dreams in places, and part of old Rhiannon’s story that came in like a song, as well as one of my favorite poems at the very end, just to make you cry a little bit. Because it’s always good to cry, says the fish in me. Tears and all kinds of white petals to ring in the summer season (may there be sun, may there be sun, may there be sun).

Glastonbury

Keepers of the clear hill
Keepers of the dark hill
Keepers of the apple hill
Women of the high hill of Glastonbury
Women of the inner hill of Avalon
Women of the womb’s hill
Island of swans
Island of catkins
Island of milk
Island of sleeping kings
Island of kings who guard the Grail

Island of kings who go into the mound 
into the underworld, into the ever-living realm 
and back, for their people
Arthur in the mound, Bran in the mound
Pwyll in the mound
Arawn king of Annwn king of the mound
Hill of vigil
Hill of the waters of women breaking
Hill of sun’s rising
Hill of kings

Here are eggs and butter
Here is milk and here is honey
For your children, and for mine

There is a haunt to Glastonbury that I had not anticipated. It rises up out of the flat fields of Somerset like something impossible, like the Otherworld swelling to meet this one. The Earth green and brave and pregnant with it. As I approach in my car I can feel the pilgrimages that have been made to this place, across the ten thousand years. The books say the great tor of Glastonbury is round like this because it is full of aquifers. Waters that feed springs both red and white. Waters that are crystal pure, and waters that are red with iron. These press up, amniotic, to make an island among fields. Tidal waters from seasonal floods once did turn the surrounding low marshes into a lake, and access to the tor was only possible by boat crossing. Now, the water is gone, but its memory is not. 

I stay only one night instead of two in a strange little cottage at the base of the tor. I am in the moat, in the lake, in the unseen tidal water that was once here. One night is all I can take. I can see the tor and tower from my skylight window. I feel like I am looking through time, and it is frightening. I am suspended in water for twenty-four hours, peering up through that water, everything soft and light and unmoored. There is no one to take you across the water now, because there is no water, and also because the time of ladies of the lake and fisher kings and grail cups and chapels to the Mary whose dowry is England is sleeping in the mound. Without them and that circling water, the place is spilling out something I can’t see but that makes it almost impossible to sleep. It’s like a compressed form of remote wilderness all seething under the green. It reminds me of the feeling that came off the red mountain ranges of  Death Valley in California when I was sixteen, fasting for three days in a desert wash where coyotes ringed the canyons with witch-weird howls at nightfall, and a puma sometimes walked, and lightning storms lit the canyons. Glastonbury needs that kind of space to expand into. Without it, I think it expands right into whoever lives at its base or goes walking up its flanks. 

I dream of three women talking of a man they love who is their family, surrounding him, holding him. I am one of those women. What can we do? they say. They hold me too. 

Denbury hill, Devon

Rhiannon

Rhiannon rode out of the mound 
on an Otherworld horse
to seek her beloved Pwyll
Rhiannon is still riding 
out of every green hill 
across Wales and Somerset 
and Devon on May Eve
to call him to her
Pwyll the man she loved

Apple petal
Chestnut petal 
Hawthorn petal
Morning's petal full of song 
He called back
He followed her a year and a day
Never quite catching up 
with her soft-footed horse
that moved through petals as if through seafoam
until his time in Annwn was through 

I can hear her riding out of Denbury hill now. Every time I walk the dog up there from our new house, I hear her. I hear her in the nettles where the Iron Age hillfort is buried, last stronghold of the Celtic tribe of the Dumnonii against the Anglo Saxons. Local custom maintains that King Geraint, last king of a unified Dumnonia, is buried here. He shares the name of a legendary Welsh king.

What stories are buried in the mound with him, what stories did they speak around the meat-spattered fire? I ask. Rhiannon, the ash tree says to me. I hear her in the wild garlic on the higher mounds at the center, and in the Bronze Age burials so old there are no stories left in folklore to speak of who is in them, and so it might be anyone—old women buried in vixen pelts with distaffs full of nettle fiber and strands of gold, a young queen on a swan’s wing with her newborn son, a sacred foal lost at birth the same night buried with them, born to the king’s fastest mare. 

Water comes down this hill too, in dozens of springs. Rhiannon’s horse drinks from them, as does Rhiannon, and they are never thirsty.

Her mare is adorned with no bells, only blue flowers and stitchwort at her ankles and yet when they come, they come ringing. There is a sparrowhawk on Rhiannon’s left shoulder and a cuckoo on her right. In the shadows always near her flies the owl whose wings are absolutely silent, and yet the color of gold.

Inside the songs of the many birds she rides. Her horse is white. A tide of hawthorn blossoms. The mounded spires of the chestnut flowers that rise from the trees around her. Some bards once sang that her horse was made entirely of such flowers, all the white ones of the first of summer. Stitchwort and wild garlic and even the foam of the Irish sea. 

But on that May morning, as I heard it, her horse was a horse of flesh and blood, as she was a flesh and blood woman, her eyes bright and her hair brighter and her thighs around her mare brightest of all, for the man who was a hunter and also a prince, the man who would be forced to serve as king of the underworld for a year and a day, Pwyll prince of Dyved who she had chosen once when she was a sparrowhawk and again when she was a mare, and now had chosen a third time as a woman when she heard the sound of his horse's hooves and his voice calling heel! to his brindled hounds on the trail of an otherworld stag. 

The old one in the hill had woven Rhiannon's girdle and combed her black hair, then. She had sung the tales of humankind to her while the spirit horses in the earth slept and aboveground men hunted. After those, the old one sang the incantations for babies to her. She sang the births of cuckoos from their eggs and dormice from their tiny golden mothers. She sang of bluebells tucked in hillsides for a thousand years that returned, suddenly and at last, from the disturbance caused by wild boars. She sang of deer laboring out their spotted fawns, and mares birthing their foals. And then at last she sang of human woman, noble in their gravity, crouching over earth, over beds of sweet smelling grasses, giving birth to human children. She sang the mammalian dignity of women in their specifically woven birth regalia, opening the doors between worlds, bringing the little body down, out of the water into the earth and air. 

I want to know of that, said Rhiannon, sitting straight up. I want to know of loving that much.

You will, said the old one. And it will be far, far more beautiful than you can possibly fathom. But so too will it be harder than you can ever know. 

The old one did not speak what she knew of the child Rhiannon would bear, how he would be stolen, how she would be betrayed, how the feathered shine of her would make even the midwives bound to protect her envious and scared, how her husband would for a time stop seeing her too and let her people treat her as a horse that carries burdens, forgetting that perfect chase for a year and a day through the greenwood and its tidal flowers, forgetting to trust her and the place she had come from. 

The old one did not speak of how her son would also be returned, a bright foal of a boy, and the betrayals healed. She could hardly keep Rhiannon in the hill for a moment longer anyway. She was full grown and womanly and hungry. The milk of the world was in her, and the songs of birth and magic. 

My heart is a bower of birdsong, she sang. My heart is a wedding bed. 

Her mare met her at the threshold. They rode out into the morning, into the May. 

Helen Stratton, The Lily of Life: The Stag ~ 1913

The White Stag

I dreamt last night of a white stag running between hedges. A leap across my path, and he was gone. His antlers were small still. He was not yet fully grown. My little black hound ran after him, but neither of us were fast enough. 

Later in the same dream there was a man who was a hunter, who was also my lover. I did not know him well but we stood naked, casually, his arm around me. I noticed that his fingertips were rough. He was telling me about how he could feel with the pads of his hands the fertility of fish in water, trout or salmon in a stream. He was showing me this. How he would stroke their silver backs and know whether they had conceived. A human woman, he said, seeming to refer to our lovemaking, which was implied though I could not recall it— I was perhaps a little startled still, and uncertain, dazed because I didn't quite know who he was— is far easier to understand. I seemed to believe him, though in waking life I would have narrowed my eyes. But in the dream I knew he knew. The pads of the fingertips were like a weaver's, or a man who has processed nettles into cloth for seven years, or built a fire again and again and again with his little firekit of sticks and stones.  

After the fish, he asked me if I had ever hunted a stag. 

No I said, and I do not want to see one die for sport if that is what you mean, for the stag is holy to me. I remembered the white one. I did not understand what he meant.

You do not know, he replied, how this too is sacred. You should come with me, to see.

I told him I had studied the prints and trails of animals for many years, and what this meant to me. 

He was amused, and beneath it impressed I think. I was pleased to impress him, but also unsettled, for we did not understand each other well. He was speaking from the hunt of long ago. He did not seem to be of my people or of my time. I was speaking of my soul's longing for God, and for love, from a world that was sad and seemed to be dying. In my world the salmon were emptying from the rivers, and the deer from the forests. It was a different thing to kill a stag, and I was not sure of his intention.

I woke without hearing what he would have told me of the hunt, still seeing his fingers on the spotted backs of the trout. 

Maybe, after all, we spoke of the same love. 

The Good Silence
By Robert Bly 

Reading an Anglo-Saxon love poem in its extravagance,
I stand up and walk about the room.
I do not love you in a little way;
oh yes, I do love you in a little way
the old way, the way of the rowboat alone in the ocean.

The image is a white-washed house, on David’s Head, in Wales,
surrounded by flowers, bordered by seashells
and withies. A horse appears at the door
minutes before a storm; the house stands
in a space awakened by salt wind, alone on its cliff. 

I take your hand as we work, neither of us speaking.
This is the old union of man and woman,
nothing extraordinary; they both feel a deep
calm in the bones. It is ordinary affection
that our bodies experienced for ten thousand years.

During those years we stroked the hair of the old, brought in
roots, painted prayers, slept, laid hair 
on fire, took lives, and the bones
of the dead gleamed from under rocks where the love 
the roaming tribe gave them made them shine at night.

And we did what we did, made love attentively, then
dove into the river, and our bodies joined as calmly
as the swimmer’s shoulders glisten at dawn,
as the pine tree stands in the rain at the edge of the village.
The affection rose on a slope century after century,

And one day my faithfulness to you was born.
We sit together silently at the break of day.
We sit an hour, then tears run down my face. 
“What is the matter?” you say, looking over.
I answer, “The ship saileth on the salte foam.”


(c)  1985 from Loving a Woman in Two Worlds

News and Events —

I will be reading from The Venus Year and possibly even singing a bit of my rendition of Tam Lin, at the Eos Festival in Exeter on May 20th, on the Wildword stage, around noon. More details here!

For those of you who missed it, there is a free video recording of my Venus Year launch here for all to view.

Wishing you all a beautiful, bright May. x