56

Each is too white to make much mark on the spreading landscape, too cool to give way as far as pastel.

That’s the one place in the landscape where rhetoric is quite absent, where the landscape if it had things to say could find ways of saying them.

Words like trout

in a glassy pool, abruptly not-there as I stare at their backs. I don’t own words but I lose them. Words don’t own me but they lose me.

‘Arbitrary’ is a migrant, erratic, follows no seasons, most of the time hides somewhere else. ‘Nutmeg’ is wary and jealous. If ‘Muskat’ comes near me, ‘nutmeg’ gets lost in the air for ages.

They have their habits, belong (wouldn’t they say?) to the Fifth Day, will inherit the earth when we step off, not one word in our mouths.

Fulton