Walking this landscape, and nothing shifts much. A change perhaps in the tenure of the earth, a moistening or drying of the skies. Imagination or sign? I start to hope the landscape might begin to end, that there is a star burning beyond the grey, that there is a dawn, a nightfall.
On a fence post, or on the horizon, or on the branches of a stunted tree, wind tortured and cracked, I see it again. Ragged bird, more bone than feather, and in watchful eyes, a malevolence born of this country I am still deep in. The bird, this avian symptom, a bird-flu god, is too large, magnified by eyes dulled by fever and eyestrain perhaps. Maybe it's size is due to certainty, because its being here tells me that this country exists, and I am nowherr it's borders yet, neither the bird or the country.
Sigh, walk on, and try not to think of grey-cold water, and the grasses of this region that move in the breeze, and I have not spoke for weeks, or sung, and I am afraid of my own voice.
Terry Dowling's An Intimate Knowledge of the Night arrived today. The ghost story as ritual. I am unutterably excited as I have been after a copy of it for years. On nights like this, dreamy and unsettled, it will be the perfect accompaniment.
I think I hear the door go, but no-one comes in.
Just wind, just air, and the thousand voices on the wind.
