My father says there is water moving inside his left leg. The GP asks whether he means pins and needles. No, he says. Water. She checks his circulation, presses two fingers against his ankle, asks if the sensation changes at night. That’s when it starts, he says. After the television goes quiet. I am there
It goes down. It all falls away. Cell membranes, dust flecks, dead leaves. Praise to the itineraries of drift. To regolith, crumbling the contact – the brittle, the lost, the unmoored. To the ash of burnt ericafolia – the silver and black of the heath in the chafe of the wind. Praise to the dried-up
They navigate by stars and the earth’s own iron, a thousand kilometres of spring dark on wings you could read newsprint through, bound for the granite country, the cool caves where they tile the walls in their sleeping thousands, each with its head beneath a neighbour’s wing, an aestivating city, waiting out the plains’ white
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