the entry to his dream lies beneath the billowing windswept tufts of a thousand hissing devil-point thistles...
...that blot out the bold red sky and sinking low to the pits of an ancient seeping stomach, a familiar place, blurred and distant in his mind. Where is it? He scratches his head and looks round for clues.
'White'. What might that mean? The thistles continue to fall in sharp shards, cutting his head open to the elements and the sky and the sinking sun seeping blood red to the lobes of a distant memory that crawls in cawl-skeined flight...
...where he remembers the brief presage of a rainbow cloud before it too sinks into the fire bush and awaits the staked claims of the vultures. That's how the ancients pass to the next realm. He remembers now,
he remembers
staked to the ground...
... and how they heap cold tiles to his cadaver, scales and feathers, dust and bones to the long night of passage...
.. and the shaft of light blinds between the trees and soft mossy places where once he danced young and proud to his maiden-headed joy
.. and still it comes flooding in rich arced jetting spumes through the thistles and blood red pulsing in his head...
.. to a silent Amish barn and the sad hangings of dusty hessian within which a gun scythes the crying children thistle-tipped to the ground.
...and they are nailed in feathers and glue to the circling birds that descend
on this joyous fecund seed bed as these images flash for one last time...
... into dream
and wonder
and
silence
