Kurki

Quite simply then, sitting on the porch in dark frost-crackling night. Venus is there and a hooked edge of the moon.

I have the very last of the Campbeltown malt in my glass; I’m still barefoot after the sauna.

My eyes are cleansed of the day’s grit – inner eye cleared of the grit of the day too. I’d set out to look for an oak forest towards Kustavi and found only a tunnel in the vuori – what Finns call a mountain – a high expanse of bedrock. I’d walked in through burst steel gates in perpendicular rockface onto an earth floor along a tunnel carved through rock. There was a cracked-open fusebox. I followed the tunnel until the dark became absolute. The weapons- and oil-bunkers at Faslane came to mind and I became nervous and retraced my steps.

Barefoot with good malt here in the night and I’m surprised by the voices of geese – I know the geese have gone south – before I realise it’s the bugling of cranes, who have a more restricted vocabulary than goose tribes. Bugling does it no justice: it’s musical: there’s a blare and a peal in it; a two note piping that echoes the day’s tunnel.

One crane is warbling, momentarily rousing the others to call before they all shut off for the night. And I’m back to the medieval of Taivassalo kirk; the back of my neck prickles and then beyond Taivassalo’s frescoes into the wild ancient mind where crane shrieks are omens.

Sibelius saw a crane flock two days before his death: “There they come, the birds of my youth."

Above and below Ainola, where Sibelius lived and died and above Saari and at the bay of Mietoisten the cranes fly and call still.

The archaic in our world is palpable in wetlands and woods; and is almost tangible in our wild minds.

Old men are boys again.