Haunted

And in the wall

The dead increase their invisible honey

W.S. Merwin

 

Since I posted last, an international conflict has begun from a carefully, carelessly dropped match, and spotfires have spread fast. Drone and missile strikes target oil shipping and infrastructure, and as always, there is immediate collateral damage, in addition to long term economic fallout. The strikes are also being used as cover for genocidal actions. Pauses in the fighting are declared and violated, declared and violated, and vast fortunes are made on consequent market volatility. As always, the civilians in whose name this war is fought have no say in its prosecution.

Coinciding with the latest ceasefire, a blocking high pressure system has been sitting in the Tasman Sea east of Australia, seeming to correlate with the sense of suspension, of waiting for the next change to come in the wider world. Day after day and night after night the air is still and warm, and full of smoke as autumn fires are lit in forests across the river, burning everything that’s left after logging, ready for the choppers to return and reseed monoculture tree crops in the ashes. The river is quiet, silky-calm, its waterways are soupy with the shit of farmed salmon and the tonnes of antibiotics that have been poured into their pens to stave off diseases that come with overcrowding and water that’s now too warm for them. Thousands of tonnes of fish die, and a stinking frill of decomposing flesh washes up along the beaches.

Snakes continue to be out and about in the warmth. T sees one nosing around a heap of loam outside the polytunnel as if trying to find a place to hide, maybe to cool off. Then a few steps away, he finds two frogs sitting out in the open – not the tree frogs that are everywhere in the garden among tomato vines and on the leaves of lettuces and other greens. They’re banjo frogs, named for their marvellous slack-string plonk plink calls. There was a big population of them in loud chorus on the dams when I arrived here nearly fifty years ago, and I would find them in their burrows in damp garden soil, sometimes far from water. Then they disappeared, killed by chytrid fungus brought in with an African frog species used for pregnancy testing; it wiped out entire amphibian populations. For decades we didn’t hear the banjo plonkdonkdink, then a few years ago one male began calling from the water, and then two, three. And now they’re back in their burrows in the garden, and the snake knew it, and was hunting them in the soft loam. Somehow the two T found had got away.

Little bats are hunting every night, making the most of the warmth and the feast that goes on as mosquitoes and other night flying insects of various kinds take to the air after their larvae have pupated. Large moths – autumn food for many creatures – emerge at dusk from the pasture where their caterpillars have been feeding on the roots of grasses. I’ve been noticing a scatter of moth wings on the white lid of the freezer we keep in one of the farm sheds; a bat has roosted on the beam overhead to eat what it catches. One evening just on dark I go to get something for the meal I’m cooking and look up – the bat is poised, mid-wrestle with a moth almost as big as itself. We take each other in for a while and then the bat resumes its struggle and I go back to the house.

In the willow windbreak beside the polytunnel, wasps sound like swarming bees as they collect resin from the buds. Yellow and brown ladybirds swarm there too, to eat sapsucking insects. Through and around me, with the soundcloud made by wings, the air breathes. It moves, but the movement doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular. All along the road, I’m walled by the sound of silvereyes eating the last of the blackberries that grow along the fencelines. It’s a light, back and forth cheeping conversation, punctuated every now and then by a territorial song – surely they’re not still nesting? And forming a sound-dome over the whole hill, dozens of ravens call as they convene in a single tree then disperse to eat roadkill. After that, from one day to the next, it’s quiet. The blackberries are finished and most of the silvereyes – those that still migrate – disappear. The ravens seem sated for the moment. But the pardalotes come back for a few days – I hear them in the trees around the house, and under the eaves at their nest – perhaps it’s one last visit before they make the long flight to the mainland.

For me it’s a season of arachnids – aptly, in Freudian terms, as I struggle with a piece of writing about my mother’s family. I leave my bag on the floor then reach in for the piece of paper I’ve used to make notes, and find that a huntsman spider – large, hairy, wandering, harmless – with a leg span as wide as my palm, has slid inside the folds and wants to stay there. When it’s raining or about to rain, these spiders often come inside, which is a trap for them, as it’s too dry in the house; I sometimes find them near death from dehydration, tangled in dust and strands of their own silk, barely able to move. This one is still quite lively though clearly thirsty – as soon as I put it outside near a puddle it sinks its mouth into the water to drink, and stays there for several minutes. A couple of days later I feel something moving in my hair and find a huge whitetail spider. Then on the bathroom floor beside my bare foot in the night, a scorpion. My words, my thoughts, my steps, haunted as the world moves through me.

Reference

W.S. Merwin. ‘Provision.’ The Second Four Books of Poems (The Lice. Atheneum, 1967). Copper Canyon, 1998.