After
The space we stood around had been emptied Into us to keep … Seamus Heaney, ‘Clearances: 7’ Overnight, it’s autumn in the angle of the light, in the smell of morning, in the beginnings of night fog on the river. The black cockatoo flock starts to gather ahead of winter, young ones chattering and wailing as they fly, excited and chasing each other like children at a festival. They come down into the garden as they have done since the trees we planted began to grow up, to eat banksia seeds and check the blackwoods for goat moth grubs, on their way to the pine windbreak,...