Skydaddy said I’m come to pour rain and dish out rainbows and I’m all out of rainbows. Oh fuck, said the old man, oh fuck. Later on the boat, days later (maybe forty? what are days when the sea is the sky is the rain) there was a sudden quiet and he knew it was time so he released one of the crows who did not return. Disappointed, he released a dove instead who dutifully brought back little sticks, little bits of mud, and dropping them and leaving and returning and dropping, in this way, in this one, was there land again.

Clockwise I don’t like this story - as a child it terrified me. To love all of this so much that you are going to have to destroy it. In any case it must have been a magpie, god’s favoured finders.

Contrarywise I like it, because aren’t I a bird too? Wasn’t I clasped inbetween two hands palm to palm , in a little warm hollow of a darkness, my heart hardly beating just humming when they said go! and I was thrown, my feathers hardly in.

I did not fall, or if I fell, it was not all — didn’t the world reach out both arms to catch me and say come, oh, let me show you, oh. And wasn’t I then known? And knowing. But I came back, I always come back with my little sticks and mud.

I’m doing it again, I’m a little bird — I’m your little bird, all these things I bring you here are fragments of something. When you have read enough maybe I will step right out of my own words, I’ll reach out my world-knowing hands and cup your face lightly in the little hollows of my palms.

Close enough to kiss you, I’m going to tell you that I love you, I love you so much that I’m going to have to destroy everything.