There is this flat pan full of water a hundred miles wide, at least, far too far to see across. There

are pylons dotted ungainly across its span like split trunks of drowned trees, hunched and slanting

shouldering cables thick as human legs, humming, it seems, home to nesting birds who have long

since learnt to never touch the ground.                            There is movement along the shore. It is

bipedal and cautious. Out of the creases of objects entrained together, out of the cinched and

flattened land, a dark word spills and brews, seeking itself out, hopeful, clotting and thickening,

carrying two people beneath the flat wild sky, close together, knowing there will be no end to this

day of exertion. No settled place. For the first time, but also for the last. The admission that this

is something we believe. Pent in. Watching smoke coil, watching rings of blue flames flutter and

wince, watching the world unburden itself, grind its way through the sludge with tired machinery,

like towns industrialized too early, seizing up, overmanned, undervalued, adrift and slowly

sinking.                        There are moments when leaving out is not quite lying. There are soft

truths, expressive truths, truths of touch and silent ministry. The lapwing pacing the dunes with its

measured wingbeat. The dunes made from sand, crushed and ground from spent glass the city

coughs up in tonnes.      Sitting in passageways and tunnels we hold our jaws against the earth.

This is our whole life, lived underground and in darkness, translucent, eyes covered by a thin

layer of skin and fur, talking at distances our astute seismic talk, making declarations against

nostalgia, the knowledge that there is no coming back from this, no bringing to light the efforts of

these lonely years spent digging. There is no crystalline truth, just an initial pulse of substrate-

borne vibration, a signal and then another not far off. The sound of water pouring in.        The

ground hums like a hive of bees. An arcing road bridge carries freight across the estuary. The

birds love this flat wet place that is always caving in, teeming with flies and fish, with the feeling

of quiet exhaustion that is like the edge of language or human sense, the known world almost,

ending itself before us, the sky and water brought so close together that they might touch and in

touching become again that total grey light out of which we stumbled in search of something to

hold onto.         I will write you a poem, in my spare time, called good vibrations. I will tap it out

with the flat of my foot to a tango rhythm. I will weep for the proud failure of song, for the

redshank as well as for the wintering wildfowl, the water voles, and some erstwhile bird of prey.­