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This giant atlas moth’s broad wings could be the map of China.
Here are two Great Walls. And there on the Manchurian tip of each forewing
are dragon heads to scare off predators. But what are those windows in the map,
where crystal scales let in the light? As if earth’s skin has windows
and at certain times of the evening they open. The newly emerged atlas
perches on my hand, and it trembles – like a new world, warming up for its first flight.
I have set up house in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood. My bed is a mat of pine needles. Cones drop their spirals
on my face as I sleep. I have the usual flying dreams. But all I know when I wake is that this bark is my vessel
as I hurtle through space. Once, I was rocked in a cradle carved from a coast redwood, its lullabies were my coracle.
I searched for that singing grove and became its guardian. There are days when the wind plays each tree
like a new instrument in the forest-orchestra. On wild nights mine is a flute. After years of solitude
I have started to hear its song. I lie staring at the stars until the growth rings enclose me in hoops –
choirs of concentric colours, as if my tree is remembering the music of the spheres. And I almost remember speaking
my first word, how it flew out of my mouth like a dove. I have forgotten how another of my kind sounds.
I lay the suitcase on Father’s bed and unzip it slowly, gently. Inside, packed in cloth strait-jackets lie forty live hummingbirds tied down in rows, each tiny head cushioned on a swaddled body. I feed them from a flask of sugar water, inserting every bill into the pipette, then unwind their bindings so Father can see their changing colours as they dart around his room. They hover inches from his face as if he’s a flower, their humming just audible above the oxygen recycler. For the first time since I’ve arrived he’s breathing easily, the cannula attached to his nostrils almost slips out. I don’t know how long we sit there but when I next glance at his face he’s asleep, lights from their feathers still playing on his eyelids and cheeks. It takes me hours to catch them all and wrap them in their strait-jackets. I work quietly, he’s in such a deep sleep he doesn’t wake once.
They're up there – the students, in their high halls, sleeping among the redwoods, in the university of leaves.
The sky is a blue-bound volume of flickering white pages they wake to – a morning mist
of evaporating inks. All night, a black bible big as the universe writes star-scriptures.
The sequoias are illuminated manuscripts through which to glimpse stories of our sun.
Their branches hum as tree-scholars take the morning staircase down. On every floor they pass
another library of light, upper storeys where birds sing hosannas, the hymn of canopy cascades,
sky-pools for the clouded salamander, the great hanging gardens of the treetops. As the students
descend, they become heavier, they stumble down the steps, for they have come to the middle region
where needles start to hiss as the breezes hush, the zone of knotholes where stars have nested
in the night-tree's swaying mast. To the lower trunk where scrolls are ash in smouldering fire-caves.
They crawl past zones of silence, those sawn- through stadium-stumps, and they go to class.
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