A well managed walking path. Last year’s storm gave woodchips from the bodies of fallen trees. Relentless touch of reeds as lovers fingers across raised arm hairs. I've been drifting towards the lakes all day. Ik drijf al de hele dag naar de plassen. Water rising inside me. Some kind of gravitational pull or water body, body of water. Only seen through satellite vision, only witnessed as a mirage, an oasis on a horizon, a mirror to aeroplane vibrations. These lakes are landscape glitches. Here amongst the laagveen, the remains of peat cutter’s houses and fishing sites bristling against bullrushes. In the lowlands where peat was formed some 10,000 years ago, sea levels rose and the rivers defied their boundaries covering the land in shallow waters. A sea which also threw up its own ridges and dunes of pale sand made marshes which gathered silt. Plants which grow in such shallow water die and sink, becoming a layer which refuses to fully decompose. My body has only ever been submerged on the peripheries of this place. Never reached the place where the people drained the land to work it, or cut the peat to burn it, never touched the space that the water filled in.

Does my body sing memories of salt water here where the sea would wash away vast swathes of land?
Inside me tides rise, sometimes gulped back by deep breaths. Morass, you are an area of muddy or boggy ground but also a confusing situation, something which entraps or makes progress difficult. Progress is nothing more than a step into the mud water. Or a horsefly bastard penetrating my skin and deflating me, sucking me dry like a sun warmed puddle.

Or the common vetch blooming. Of de bloeiende wikke. The tern hunting. De stern op jacht. The warbler singing. De karekiet die zingt. The dragonfly laying eggs. De libelle die eieren legt. The coot chasing the duck. De meerkoet die achter de eend aan jaagt. The broad leaf plantain faced toward the sun. De weegbree naar de zon gericht.

My body is drawn. Along the small river, barely noticeable on a map where crayfish duck in and out of holes, measuring perimeters claw by claw with alien determination. An underwater movement, fish or bird, or maybe the silt shifts itself in a river bed dance, whilst another being beneath the surface imitates raindrops. Dry summer for a wetland, mud hardened like callused hands, spring was as brutal as the hen harriers and gulls ripping chicks from nests.

Kwetsbaar, a delicate balance, another year hoping for the bitterns to breed, desperate to hear their guttural booms pass through us. Here on the lake, we’re already mourning the migration of the black winged stilt and the swifts. Seeing ghosts, a body as a white gap in the landscape, the sun rays illuminate the undulating form of a spoonbill.

Quiet my movements and voice, still my body, skills learnt to shake off the city, forgetting incessant need to fill empty air with jokes. Let my toes take me to the black water, yellow socks soak up the pigment making me heavy and safe. I am welcomed. The water makes my hands unrecognisable, turns me into someone else, makes me it’s own. The soles of my feet decipher the lake bed, small rocks, soft surface, a ledge. Feeling the cold on my heart, I breathe the stale air of nearby guano, same air which found its way through bird hide windows, same air inhaled on cliff tops clinging to edges.

Surrounded by trees, an oak heavy with galls and willow or poplar turned to skeletons in their crowns by cormorants silhouetted to the sun.

Omringd door bomen, een eik zwaar van gallen en wilg of populier, omgevormd tot skeletten in hun kronen door aalscholvers in de zon.

They say I am a creature of ill omen, sat devising death with wings outspread.

Ze zeggen dat ik een slecht voorteken ben, die met gespreide vleugels de dood bedenkt.

My body as slick feathers, iridescent like oil as I am submerged.It will take more than one winter’s rain to rid the trace of me.