Songs about English wildflowers as seen through the eyes of a mythical crow called Cro
Crowden
2022
Qureat Alghurab
Gusstaka na Garvanah
Wuya Xiao Senlin
Kraai Kreupelhout
Crowden
Metsäsaarekkeella (feat. Katri Matikainen)
Krähen Wäldchen (feat. Elaine DiMasi)
Kauve Ka Jungal
Hutan Gagak
Karasu No Zokibayashi
Kageya Kadu
Corvus Silvam
Crowden is an album of 12 songs about a copse, each of which highlights a plant as seen by a crow character who is called Cro. Each song is called simply 'Crow's Copse' but in a different language each time, in alphabetical order so using Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Hindi, Japanese, Indonesian, Kannada and Latin
Qureat Alghurab
From a great height
The flat plain emerges
My misty descent is close-winged, heart plunging
Cold wind tearing, tearing my eyelids
I see your quadrate form, field-bounded
I target a low entry point
An arabesque aperture in the understory
I time the gyre of my momentum
Diffusing to speedlessness
Capping my inertia
I am down in the spinney at Tinney
Flustered, encloaked by the dapple spring-light
Beams of flicker heat draw effusively
Lines plenipotentiary and purposeful
Qureat alghurab
Anenome speaks to me
Anenome entreats me
Anenome defeats me
Anenome completes me
Scattering shards
Sublimating simulacra
Sweating the source code
Ruminating the ramparts
Culminating in the curious
What are you called?
How can I place you? White-glazed, blue-greened, purple veined
At the foot of the ash culm
Via the learning of names
I increase my power
Yet remain subsidiary, interstitial
Here in the great glowing of name-space
I can flower and re-flower, spring and re-spring
Corner-side, root-sat
Splaying my wings against the febrile ground
Feeling the grains and nodules of worm-cast soil
Entuning vibrations to calibrate your soul
Internalising all your outer beauty
and fierce fellowship
Anenome nemorosa
Gusstaka na Garvanah
Deep in the shaw
Co-creating silently
Building up to forming a plan
Pasting peculiar pockets
Of half-remembered regions
Gusstaka na Garvanah
Plasmid patience following circular arguments
Anhydrogenase reduces, digests, breaks the loop
Creating sticky ends
Endlessly copied and transformed
From fragments and segments
Electrophoresis reveals
The distinctive banding of:
Enchanter's Nightshade
Speckled and splayed, half-unseen
Tiny whites, tri-petalled
Ever so slightly coppered, toasted by the sun
Matt-leaved and splendorate
Dull-veined but flowing rich with deep magic
The sun has moved just two degrees and the time for spellcast has arrived
I am poised with potential, part onlooker, part participant
Holly looks on, a sharp-toothed canopy
The little patch of enchantment
As the spell's mysteries begin to take hold
Dragging me down
Under the flow
Under the dreamline
Under the spell
Under the influence
The Holly offers no help
Just blank-faced shards and angles
Motionless, emotionless and
Deeper than the dark green gloss of its leaves
Spikey yet spineless
Gravitating to an isotopic continuum
We are all changed but seemingly untouched
As if we had already been spellbound and sepll-released
And with a jaunty Parisian tail-flick
I move on, untransformed
Circaea lutetiana
Wuya Xiao Senlin
A copse in cold winter light
Kelvinate corpuscles incriminating color temperatures
6,000 K of blue-grey
Infinitely stranded, the network of evolution spans and insinuates an anti entropic directions into all beings
Variation: multithreaded, green-leavened, birth-channeled and unbound
Copiously corralled curated consequence
Cro summons Cleve from the air, tapping into the universal well of cleverness,
channeling through wings and sternum
through claws gripping the uppermost branches of the Elder.
Cleve flows through tips and twigs and branches and boughs
Wuya Xiao Senlin W¿y¿ xi¿o s¿nlín ¿¿¿¿¿
It all starts here, threaded with a needle of Stitchwort leaves, pointed, sharp
Poly-veined, hyper hyphal
Fullsomely forensic
Mass distribution, complete convolution
Omnidirectional fizzing of life-force
From plant to plant, microbe to megafauna
Soil-crumb to megalith
The blind white purity of each four-petalled face
Guiding the future, driving the present, built on the past
Stellaria holostea
Kraai Kreupelhout
Symbiotic give and take
Each transaction arrayed along a spectrum
Clinging to coppice, stealthily submerged, cruising inelegantly through leaf litter and
Homeric hurricanes of humus
Toothwort
Corolla irregular
Imbricated in the bud
Parasitical on the roots
Concealed, bell-shaped and united
Pastel-purple, colour barely there
Cro smells something, nothing, the lack of chlorophyll
The neutral ebb of root-sap
Flowing, but not a fair exhange
Hazel does not seem to mind
Several crimson stigmas
Enclosed in a bud-like involucre
Tiny heralds of Spring's effusiveness
Kraai Kreupelhout
Defiantly effortlessly phytotrophic
Unjudgemental of nutrient flows
Cro wonders for the first time about having a place in a heirarchy
Actions great and small
Endeavours ,ighty and humble
Honour accorded and received
Privilege distributed
It all seems purposeless to Cro
Opaque and fabricated, a hollow echo in the face of , instant expression
Cro moved on, unhesitant
Lathraea squamaria
Crowden
A curious clump, quite querulous and catch-all
Clanking and tympanic, tall limbs tousled and tumbled
Uppermosts gale-battered and spirally upswept
Negligibly nestled at the base of the boughs
Shielded from shouty sheets of rain rod rattling and torrential raging roars
Cro can hear a whisper to the thunder
Like and eye opening in the darkness
The pale-lipped White Helleborine defies the shade
Exquisite tenderness and delicate dissonance
A pure un-white, smudged yet clean
The Beech strews tresses of three-cornered mast down onto its protegee, garlanding the glade
A feast for yellow-necked woodmice and stock dove alike
Crowden
Cro tries to assimilate the vibrance of the Helleborine, to taste the nutty wholesomeness of the beechmast,
but to no avail
Cro's dark eyes fall but do not grasp
Cro is patient, persistent, peerless, and tries and tries and tries some more
But still no flavour, no resonance
Cro shrugs, flies on
Sometimes the world is transparent to us; we have no receptors
Sometimes giving up is neutral, easy, a word scratched out in soil, erased by the wind
Cephalanthera damasonium
Metsäsaarekkeella
with Katri Matikainen
Slumbering forms
Nukkuu, nukkuu, kivimuurit mullan alla
Long-buried stone walls
Triumphs of architecture
Crumbled to forgotten nothingness
Murenee unohdukseen
Metsäsaarekkeella
Karviainen kasvaa, varis
Raakkuu, raakkuu
Keisari vanhan ja uuden
Raakkuu, raakkuu, raakkuu
Bell-shaped
Thorn-guarded
Green-hairy
Never-fruits
Metsäinen saari pellon keskellä
Kohtalon edessä se nöyrtyi
Raita tuhottiin perhosen alta
Häiveperhonen, oi parka
Kohtalon varis kumartumaan joutui, joutui, joutui, joutui, joutui...
Metsäsaarekkeella
In the Crowden
Karviainen kasvaa, varis
Gooseberries grow
Raakkuu, raakkuu
Crow caws, caws
Keisari vanhan ja uuden
Emperor of old and new
Raakkuu, raakkuu, raakkuu
Metsäinen saari pellon keskellä
The grove is an island in the field
Kohtalon edessä se nöyrtyi
Humbled in the face of destiny
Raita tuhottiin perhosen alta
Goat willow was destroyed beneath the butterfly
Häiveperhonen, oi parka
Oh poor, poor Purple Emperor
Kohtalon varis kumartumaan joutui, joutui, joutui, joutui, joutui...
The crow of destiny had to bow, had to, had to, had to ...
Ribes uva-crispa
Ribes grossularia
Krähen Wäldchen
with Elaine DiMasi
Sea cliffs rise out of the perspective-wide ocean plain
Chop-sided island cloaked in spindrifts of salt spray
Foraminifera ooze sediment, creating vast beds of calcerous coccoliths
Millennia-buried deep underground
But the currents still flow
Timewards, Clevewards
We'll walk and hear the ferns and thickets
Lay eyes on a bowing stem
Stop our feet like brambles
Redirect our rambles
Radiärsymmetrische Blüte
Radially symmetric flowers
Mit fünf Kronblättern
With five petals
Und vielen Staubblättern
And many stamens
Bramble
380 microspecies
With which Cro requires leisure and enthusiastic diligence to familiarise
Krähen Wäldchen
In the dene of the crow
Wind-beat Whitebeam
is flashing as in gusts
Bristol, Wilmott's, Robertson's, Houston's and Observatory
A blinking background, pulsating codes and temporal transients
Modulating the transmission of:
Beaming Brombeeren and Blackberries
Bouncing beauties bursting barriers and breaking the boundless burdens
Cro just likes the taste
Rubus fruticosus Agg.
Kauve Ka Jungal
Under a tranquil canopy
Cubes of clarity are carved into by curious Cro
Wrenching beakwards, in search of
Prismatic loveliness
Cro's deepening desire for shards of beauty is always close
Never-closer, almost unfelt
Purple pleasure but unscented, dog-named
A reporoach for its want of perfume
Kauve ka jungal
Deep deep deep deep
Deep in the thick of the thicket
Violet
Sepals acute, awl-shaped bracts, stem channelled
Dog Violet, Blue Mice, Shoes and Stockings
Sycamoe fights and flights
Tall-tangled and artless, flaunting and gaunt
Cro maps their differences and learns their habits
Swallowing swan song and superficial architecture
Cro beams Byzantine belligerencies to counter
The flow of insipid indolence
A cartography of creativity and calibrated critiques
Viola canina
Viola riviniana
Hutan Gagak
Suddenly Cro
Suddenly know (s)
Suddenly how to
Access the flow
Sees future sees past
As if Cro could always do this
A memory, a wish, a dream
Hutan gagak
Resonance is strong here
Instant summer, a wing beat of cold winter
Followed by ice ages
Then prehistorical cycads, ferns, horsetails and supercontinents
Cro stops crowness
Cro halts movement
Under-curls legs and sits on the ground
Meditating, cro-ditates, all ears open
Cro opening as if a flower
After the quietness Green Hellebore reveals itself
Fading in and out of perception
Palmate-leaved
Green-petalled
Poison-honeyed
Early flowering
Injure-foot-green
The towering Norway Maple readies itself to
Fling down redgreen winglets, decoratively, over the scene
Cro feels changed now, stranged now
Is adjacency required?
Or is Cro touched and inspired?
An infinity of possibility
Has opened up
Forward, back, sight, sound smell, even travel
A time-travellind crow
Helleborus viridis
Karasu No Zokibayashi
Elegance and beauty are in the dark round eye of the beholder
Smooth and pure, texturalised and maculate
Black pebble, white pebble encounter each other
Repelling and attracting
Cro is always drawn to beauty, wherever it may fall
In the corner of the copse
A five-stem yew
Burnished by mastodons
Shrugged of stormfall becch boughs
Wafting yellow-clouded
Guarding, guarding small beauties
Leaf merged around stalk
Stalk piercing leaf
Cradling the precious delicate white flower of
Spring Beauty
Cro cannot create
Cro is already purple-fringed blackness beauty
Karasu No Zokibayashi
Cro feel wu-wei
Cro becomes three-legged, yatagarasu
Feel the qi of nature
Present the qi
Let nature flow through
Cro-men, omen, a rare sand land, distant
A change stirs within
Cro stamps a clawprint in the soft dark canvas of a molehill
Cares, with a diagonal stroke of the beak, a slash aboe the claw
First glyph, first art?
Cro contemplates, critiques
Rejects, restarts, reconsiders, renews, accepts -- creates!
Claytonia perfoliata
Kageya Kadu
Longtime looking, Cro searches for ideas and information
Nuggest of mind-nutrients, morsels of memory and math
Cro looks northside dark colder mossworn striated elm-bark no food here today
Cro looks southside warm yellow sun-hot
Cro looks windward nothing here today westward windswept unkempt snack-free zone
Cro look lee, there! In the pocket, in the eddy-calm
Two early grasshoppers make a long-awaited meal
But what was the question again?
Twayblade unfrayed concave wide-splayed leaf blades
Kageya kadu
A simulacro approaching requisite density
Full-bore stomach rumbling
A twisting gnawing tumbling
A vast emptiness, cavernous inside Cro
Hunger-Elm fastidious and flaccid
Burgeoning and belly-ached
Cro realises that food and thought and entirely different concepts
Staves off the pangs with ascetic determination
Accessing the prallel worlds with perpendicular words
Skimming the arrays to find the version where food is
Right here right now, easy-grabbed beak-bountied, belly burstful
Then back to world A.prime.stop.zero
Cro thinks is is a great Trickster trick
Cro sits by the orchid, breathing in world-density
Before long Cro realises:
The hunger is not gone -- you can't take metabolites between worlds:
The small plain orchid's lesson
Neottia ovata
Corvus Silvam
Drenched in dark-light dew glow flew Cro
Twisting downwards to the understory
'Twas the first visiting to the particular peculiar copse
Cro feels unbelonging
Alien feeling, not-invented-here
This unsettles Cro
The always-feels-at-home Cro
On the incarnadine edge
A Yellow Balsam dangles, oblvious
A fellow alien form, displaced and immigrant
Wandering and hopeful, unjudged
Cro cannot process this anomaly
Uncomfortable and non-sequitur
Cro looks around for an escape plan
Poplar gives a route up its obloid trunk
Cro follows, scamper-flapping, beak skywards
Bursting through twig tips and canpy
Wings almost-eagle, Cro soars
Ever skyward, homewards, the the embrace of sky
Higher and higher, black heat of sun on wing, deep blueness
Wide eye scatter, muscles lactic-sore
Forgetting the future, scanning the horizons
Deftly distinguishing the half dome
Cro can see green everywhere until the edges of view
Eyes strain for distant colour -- ocean blue
Eyes strain for truth -- the next clue
Impatiens noli-me-tangere
Monocrome
2021
Clawhill
Docga Scanca
Elwood
Roelandia
Churr, Churr
Leighbye
Burntwood
Scoldhill
DonQuen
Deneley
Agathorn
Marden Parfa
Following the explorations of Cro, a mythical young crow with an affinity for wild plants and flowers, each song in Monocrome is about a particular botanical species that Cro encounters, seen through a crow's eyes and inspired by a series of black and white photographs taken in the chalk hills of Surrey, England. Each song finishes with a micro-madrigal of the Latin name of the plant
Clawhill
The light is sticky
Cloying 3D gel
I swoop and I yaw
Down the kaleidoscope tunnel
Tracks twin-coloured red and
Tracks twin coloured yellow
Each shifting the leaves and sky
Darkening, deepening, enriching
Clawhill
Nutrimental, proteinaceous
Frill-fronded and mani-fingered
Vetch
Vetch! Interleave my claws and toes
Vetch! Amongst the graspoing tendrils
Dry and baked, crackling in the diagonal shift-wind
Foolish and furious
Great expanses strewn
All across the hillside
Buffeted and tuffeted, purple-fold
Ultimately correct by wavelength
and perceived vision
Vicia sativa
Docga Scanca
Docga Scanca
Inhaled, imbibed, infused
A catechism of distant lands, exotic
Tibia fibia, angled askance
I see in the blackness, the crowness, shadow lifting
Prising details and thoughts from the
Lost edges of nothingness
Dynamic range
Highlights flown away upon a rising wind
Western Red Cedar
Hangs soft-shouldered and shaggy
Annelid-antsy, quasi-tabbed and quorate
Ocean-warped tumblepass grooves crimping ever upwards
Fathomable, top to toe
Tamburate in the white heat
Carved into the landcape, seared into the hroizon
Full-full-ranging from night-black to noon-light
Lemon taste in my mouth
Thuja plicata
Elwood
My organic eyes lock on the grid
Straining to discern meaning and pattern
From low-res piixellation
Slowly, detail emerges from the tall trunks
Fractal from bough to branch to twig to leaf
to petiole to stomata to cell
Resolution: Atomic 1:1
Highest definition
Integrated to infinity
Non-Bayesian
Austrian Black Pines
Sway in a Pinetum
Hard and obsidian, barked and needled
The goldcrests flit, chit-chittery
The goldcrests flit, obliviously
Ignorable
I feel I am passing from one stage to the next
Indefinably
A sudden claarity of thought and vision
Purpose falling into place
Arising logically from action
Pinus nigra nigra
Roelandia
Twisting underfoot
Adjusting an imbalance
Fluting a flaccid covering, clinging pink
I tunnel deep, reaching for sliders
Adjusting the underlying colours, before I convert
Foxglove
Cleve comes quickly, channeled and controlled
Effusive and hapful, the foxglove acting as both
Aerial and distributor, scattering rays
In a radial pattern
Emanating from the Other Place,
Recharging the critical faculties of beings everywhere
Roelandia
Colours beyond colours
New colours, no colour
How much Cleve you receive
Depends only on your ability to absorb
On your capacity for mental growth
You appetite for cleverness
For crows, this is infinite
So they are the ideal custodians of Cleve
As they neither need it nor lack it
Digitalis purpurea
Churr, Churr
Spangle-shaped, precious, my consciousness
Sparks and extrudes in the vast realm
I take the potion
Sample the colourless sepaks
And step suddenly sideways
Into the Monocrome
Tufted, claw-webbed, un-flowered
A random-spiralled discourse
Droplets of insouciance
From an alternative story line
I want to dive deeper into
Here the Old Man's Beard,
The Traveller's Joy
Is smoking over the hedge
Churr, Churr
Here it is the shape that tells the story
Where colour, not tone is the arbiter,
The belly-seeker
Fibonaccian descent of bit depth
My pallette, my memory
Each sensation tonally flat
Each shard of light critical
Each photon a grain of volcanic sand
Anti-basaltic
Dendritic forms subsume entire portions fo my cortex
My veins spread and pulse,
Achromatic in the lightless light
Soon the deluge of gray matter, grey anamorph
Is more me than less me
Black and white in infinite gesture
Inside me yet outside
Endlessly intertwined
Yet never totally grey
Always asymptotic towards 18% balance
Clematis vitalba
Leighbye
Minimum shade, maximum light
Bordering on edges shunted aside
Frenetical receptacle, giddying gourd
Laid by the labyrinth
Shuttled and rolled whitewards
Comprehending pure points of
Black and White vs Grey
A compromised balance point?
Leighbye
Nexus for nebular, foam-cored spheres
Apex for thoughts and
Crux of decisions
Sphero-phlobotronic
Snowberry, snowberry - pop!
Snowberry, snowberry - pop!
Infraction cessate and terminal
Forog-pinted and blunty
Mere-drawn metaflorical
Adorably pale-crisp, bountiful and blowzy
Round-tumble and accenturate
A coming together
That never quite comes to pass
Symphoricarpus albus
Burntwood
Living hand to mouth, claw to beak
Accepting the next task blindly
Not knowing the larger plan
Am I destined to always live in the shadows?
Suddenly I see a parallel, a parable
A young leaf casts a shsdow
On the older leaf below
Nettle siblings
Nettle order of things
Nettle cardioid leaves
Nettle long-petioled
Lighting strikes, igniting a flame
Creating black, blackenedness from light
Burnt intensity, burnt life
Burntwood
My turn will come
Waiting from my chance to un-shine
Embracing the shadows
To fly out to the other side
Urtica dioica
Urtica urens
Scoldhill
Climbing up to the wall I find myself
Climbing up to the nexus of hollow stem
Climbing uo to Scoldhill
Black background, white foreground
Contrasting light and shade
Marginal areas uncermonially dumped off the curve's apex
Detail vanishing into balckness
Hogweed and Snail
Only the brightest and best still standing under this
Umbrella of Contrast
Cow Parsnip
To counter the heat and dryness, the snail aestivates
Cemented to the stalk, an aerial sanctuary
Swaying Julliard and Augustine on a parched platform
Dreaming of distant dew and the unfolding of rain-soaked leaves
A febrile emptiness, inner freedom from:
Scorn and Scold, Storm and Scald
Scoldhill
Heracleum sphondylium
DonQuen
Waft wavy wing-effect - lift dapple
Seen (as if through a ) veil
Inconsequential, indecisive moment
Shutter speech
Flutter speechlessness
Backdrop draped
Eyes straining for detail that isn't there
It all makes sense from a distance,
It all makes sense
DonQuen
Willow-by-the-rivers
Seeing the world through
The inverse of a fly's eye
One / Oneth of a second
Slab of growth
Implied by both presence and absence
Driven by the wind, lifted wholesale
by the busying of air en masse
Salix babylonica
Deneley
Crystal align
Taste buds crinkle, curious
Truth is overlaid
As seen through
Countless tiny shadows
Sharp yet diffuse
Deneley
Particles of thought
Arrayed and condensed
From extraneous to contemporaneous
Holistic and linear
Grain and grit
The shadows make a noise
That only you can hear
Jack-run-by-the-hedge
Mustard and garlic
Garlic mustard
Parallel wisdoms in linear arrays
I am seeking edges
Travelling this corridor
A straight line as I fly
Whilst taking instantaneous side journeys
Each developing my mind, gaining me credits
Chalking up a future number
That is the sum and tally of all my parts
All my thoughts all my ideas all my dreams
Alliaria petiolata
Agathorn
Roundels decorate
Breathing clamly
Stomata inspirate
Shadowed, unalarmed
Petioles pulse
With particular pleasantries
Golden-orbed and gallant
Aathorn
Flying along the isobar
I follow contours of light from afar
Swooping incline points of light
Directing rays with my path of flight
Receptors
Receptivity
ISO
Sycamore Black Spot
Acer pseudoplantatus
Marden Parfa
Late bloomer, great blur-er
Soft abstraction, de-clarification
Oofa, oofa, oofa
I am immersed
In and out of focused area
A backdrop of blurriness
A confounded context
Circles of confusion all around
My globe-headed early autumn nectarine bounty
Last taste of sweetness
For fly, bee and wasp
Ivy flower, ivy flower
Late september late septmeber
Vespa nectar circumnavigation (the globe)
0.95, 1.4
Nocticro, Corilux, Coronecron
Marden Parfa
Leaves become formlaee, globular, diffuse
Supporting and lifting
Framing and shading
Anonymous in the background
But performing an essential role
Hedera helix