I said I would write about the countryside yet, when I thought about the countryside, many images came up far too cosy to cope with. You see, I relished people more -- people with fractures in their thought-bones, gaps between the logic of their ligaments, missing links between one joint and the next. Joints joined to joints making a limb with nothing between the joints we could possibly call a limb. But a still a limb to go about upon to describe the one I love.

But I said I would write about the countryside and so my duty was to do just that. The flowers were sweet centred, soft-smelled, petalled with kisses, wispy in the wind. The grasses were spread out like loose lawns, through which I tripped like a nature poet with words in my sack and gentle thoughts in my head. The sky was clear blue, laced with imaginary clouds, yet no sun to speak of. Perhaps it hadn’t risen or had just set, but it was still as bright as if the sun were high shining. Not even the black eye of a static eclipse could solve the conundrum. Yet my countryside was the same as your countryside. Just as describable, just as pleasant and langorous, simply just as perfect for a nature poet’s treatment with pen and pensive brow.

Yet in my countryside there were undercurrents missing from yours. Or, at least, as far as our relative descriptions of it portended. Yours remained sweet and lovely and full-scented with thyme and honey, buzzed by bee and bobbed by bird. Even your shadows were explicable, beneath the full-blown sun. In my countryside, lack of sun brought out shadows that were merely shadows in your countryside but more like shapes in mine. An armadillo or arm-ratchet poked a proboscis into view from under shrub or tree-shade. You looked in vain for any such worrying signs in your countryside. In mine, the longer your eyes became accustomed to the different quality of light, the more you saw things you wouldn’t want to have seen even in a nightmare.

“Hi!” you said.

I simply knew you must have left your own countryside to visit mine, because boredom had set in with all the nice description with which you had saddled yourself. In my countryside, description itself could take wing like the huge birds of prey that your starlings, thrushes, robins and chaffinches had become.

Although we had yet to get to know each other properly, I knew you’d become my love, the longer you stayed. Indeed, my countryside, as I had described it, would make you seek my arms as a form of protection. I took your upper arm between my testing fingers and felt the muscles move beneath the skin like separate creatures. I touched your petal lips with mine. You shrank back.

“I hate your countryside. It is too bright, despite the shadows thrown by an invisible sun.”

Of course, I had put the words into your mouth. This is my description after all. If you had managed to lure me into your own version of countryside—one with velvet dawns and light breezes and deep green foliage and lush-thick rivers—you might have been able to make me say simply anything … like I love your countryside, with its sun-free acres and climbable bark … like I love you, too, with your flower-tressed hair and lithe, supple limbs of willow.

As soon as the words had left my mouth, I saw you cower back into a dark patch of mildewy shadow, eager for consorting with whatever wielded the cantilevered limbs from its trunk.

As for me, I retreated from my countryside to your countryside, although your description of it was not complete, unfinished because of your own exchange visit to my countryside. I quite enjoyed the gaps you’d left. You being the biggest gap of all that your countryside now sadly nursed.

Yet, I could fill these missing spaces with more than just the interfaces of kissing, as I dreamed of you wandering amid the crueller countryside of which my description had bestowed a bequest to our hopefully meeting again, meeting halfway between the shifting surfaces of other countrysides, countrysides that ratchet within a moving carapace of … of what? … plain poetic pleasure? … exquisite pangs of unrequited love? … indescribable joy of creative writing? … academic satisfaction in extending our interest in nature study? … spirituality of giving our Creator true credit?

I ask which side of which countryside should I describe. And, whilst trying to fill the gaps bored by boredom, I burn yet another blind spot in the sky.


(published 'Dreams & Nightmares' 2000)