The landscape licked the words from me. I cannot fit the slither of your sounds into my mouth yet here another vocabulary is forming. I reach the wounds of a bogland, skin cold despite sun which squints my eyes wet. Earthly ruin, a working landscape in convalescence. This liminally liminal place, a memory of undigested horsetail, willow and reed as subterranean alchemy. Moving at the speed of peat, I grow a millimetre a year and never apologise for my lack of haste. Here, skirting around the cut perimetres of harvest, watch in real time as the geometry of extraction softens at the edges, cuckoo song marks the progression of time. Traversing the tarmac path like a grazed knee, take notice of an uninhabited house exhaling sunlit dust particles. Scratch at fantasies of occupying rooms that have no distinct purpose.

At the edge, I take a path wrapped in nettles and allow the caress to make welts on my skin, trace them mentally as map contours. My pocket holds seed pod detritus, crushed into lifeless fibres through improper handling. Pilfered from the shoreline of another’s garden I carry this unwitting collaborator with me and tuck seeds beneath my fingernails.
I am silent now, i know no words for this place, from outside walking only at the mud-soaked peripheries.
Gggg Gggg, Rrrr Rrrr (dutch consonants). Wetted lips, i spit sounds into the earth and the earth drinks. Gggg Rrrr, swallows till I'm ankle deep in the black water. A body accepted by the bog is preserved by this acidity, skin kept like fragile leather, rejected from the hope to be compost. Bog body, dwelling somewhere between lives, deflated like a stolen rucksack thrown into the river, hair red as copper. Bog body, clay vessel, arrow head, perhaps a necklace, a cloak, a single shoe. A landscape which was worked might have also been sacred, a landscape which was sacred might also have been worked.

I float my desire for reciprocity upon this surface.

Picture a bogland so wide you cannot pass it, you build a path to find a way through but find yourself in an eternal centre. I cannot find a home here, i mistake this emptiness for hunger and take a mouth full of soil between my teeth. It coats the inside of my throat, wishes to put words in me. Wishes me to choke on this culture. What is the smell of burning peat clinging to nostril hairs, to wool shawls, to cheap outdoor waterproofs? A smell which calls me to some ancestry I’ve never had, some land I was never connected to.
My mother told me of great great great grandparents, a glassblower and a potter, illiterate who signed their names with an X. I make my bones into glass and clay, made of the ground, the sand, the rock, fragile, tough. I take the words from the page, take the language from my hands. This ancestry which is nothing more than a list of names.
Here in this water land, the peat was cut for the pottery factory, to fuel the kilns and fire the clay. To make tiles and bowls, pots and vases with hand painted images of boats and birds. Strange how the phrase is ‘reclaimed land’, as if the land was taken back for its rightful ownership. As if the drainage dikes and polders recovered areas on temporary loan to the water. I come across a bench to sit on, i've got this tenseness in my body and focus hard to become jelly. Some bogs are like waterbeds to walk on, glancing through google this corporeal experience is described over and over. Quaking, wavering back and forth, like stepping across the surface of a lake.