A Pure Thrush Word

Speaking of love, my dad died two years ago today. 

He was 91. Cloth cap dilettante born into corridors of class and circumstance, working life—draftee, decorator, copper, courier—half-disguised secret dream self—poet, memoirist, local historian, cricket lover, hillwalker, herpetologist, hankerer after high, wild places. . . . He'd fallen at home a couple of weeks before but, in the way these things often seem to go, he’d rallied and was doing better. The end, when it came, was quick. He was holding my mother's hand and died on his own bed, in his own house, on his own terms.

Change was a horror. “Time is the enemy” he once wrote. “It plucks you back when you would run; it hurries you when you would pause to reflect.” I remember the family joke about Time's great black oxen, their galloping hooves trampling all before them.

We laughed then, but we knew all along that those oxen are real.

And now he's two years gone. 

On my last trip back, in 2019, we talked about Edward Thomas, and his poem "The Word," about memory, about time passing, about losing all that once was to what Thomas calls the "undefiled / Abyss of what can never be again." 

My dad suffered terribly because of his fundamental inability to be flexible, to flow with time. But what capacities he’d developed to experience the "empty thingless name" of this moment, right here, now, he was able most fully to experience out in nature, on the many hikes he and I took across the moors and hills of Yorkshire when I was a teen.

In the photo he sent me, he’s walking up the “track from Linton Falls to Bordley Moor” (ever the archivist, he’s written it on the back), heading with rucksack and boots and that familiar stride for the dun colored tops of the far horizon. 

For Thomas, what rescues us from Time's ceaseless erasure is the "empty thingless name . . . cried out ... / From somewhere in the bushes by a bird / Over and over again, a pure thrush word." On ancient green roads and lonely tracks, in the plainspoken poetry of ponds, rivers, trees, and hills, my father showed me a way to side-step Time's remorseless theft. Frozen in place in the photo he’s free of Time but, as I see now, up there on those paths to the wild secret places he was free all along, redeemed from his captivity by the pure thrush word of nature's song.

A religion of the senses. The warp and weft of ordinary, mysterious, existence. These he knew, couldn't always translate. But what he's passed along to me, and that will always live on in me while I am breathing, are those moments of seeing and of noticing, those moments I now know are glimpses of the true nature of all things. 

Springtime frogspawn. Sticklebacks and sparrows blowing through the blue. The glimmering sunlight dappling a wall. The “pure thrush word” of nature that always, no matter where I am, transports me back to him.

Somewhere, still, he’s walking those high places. 

A skylark is singing in the blue wind-scoured sky. 

Clouds chase their shadows across the fells.