The Dance
Morning Walk at Cannon Hall, Barnsley
Electric orange, acid yellow, cyan, these bird-like
guardians, totems carved from pine and oak, installed
in their set stations, keep watch over the narrow serpentine,
the muddy island, this tangled wilderness of trees.
Unflickering presences, I watch them watching me.
But now ten feet away at the edge of the lakeside rough –
matted drift of thistle heaped in full seed, rosebay
willowherb feathering the bright air, the humbler plants
scrambling between – motionless in scrawny, grey-brown
occupation of the earth, a heron stands.
Seeing me watch, believing itself unseen against
the sun-bleached verticals, slowly its yellow eye
blinks – once, twice; slowly the nictitating membrane
slides across. Such self-disguising stillness stills
even the hurrying light, until, in the next long age,
its right leg hinges back, and fastidiously it takes
the perfect step its innate avian ch’i directs,
Sabre or Sword, it may be, the slim and deadly head
easing minutely forward on its snake-like neck.
I do not need to lift my eyes to know that beyond
the artful ha-ha at the top of the Park the old House
holds the two of us, and its entire demesne,
vacant and benign, in the sweep of its antique gaze.
I can afford not to look away. I shift, cautiously,
my slow, human weight from one leg to the other.
Cautiously, the heron ventures another step,
angular and exact, and since it seems I am neither
startled nor amazed, it ventures yet one more.
And so we conduct our wary dance. The polychrome Guardians
ranged on their wooden posts watch but are unmoved.
‘The Guardians of Bird Island’ is an installation of wooden sculptures erected so as to overlook the ornamental lake at Cannon Hall, Cawthorne, near Barnsley.