i wish
rustling and dark
Last night I climbed into a tree that took me into its embrace. The saddle of the tree was high enough from the ground that I could draw my feet up and rest my forehead on its forehead, you know how trees do, and only the soft balance that is innate and the relatively large heft of spinning Earth in comparison with Earth’s fast spin kept me resting there. Me & tree, tree & me. Far away on the other side of the oval the lit windows of the little sports club shone all their inner information onto the dark pitch. Somebody was having a meeting and their backs turned to the long windows faced me. Underneath the boughs of the tree and around its skirts someone else, or maybe some of the same people, had planted monstera dark and rustly like elegant dinosaur hands. They had used a rotted horse manure or somewhere nearby hessian was rotting or somehow or other the tree smelt of horse. Stables and horse. Climbing a tree, crouching in its lowest branches, closing my eyes and smelling a scent of old stables was as high as I wanted to climb just then into such heaven as is available to us. That’s how it felt. The breeze moved around me like night, like a thousand little whispering hands.
