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Lynne Rees

Noise

I wait, knowing it’s more than leaf or cone, or a stone kicked down from the top of the glen scuttling through branches. And then it arrives with a bounce, rummaging the carpet of leaves, the ferns, stops to sniff—black chips of eyes, cream-bellied—and crosses the path as if I’m not there. And I’m not, for a moment my breath stilled, sunk back into the forest—bark, leaf-mould—and a noise like the rush I heard yesterday, a sea-slug shell pressed to my ear, the tide in the shallows streaming sand around my feet. A small, slow shift of the world.

wrapped
by the forest canopy
an eyeful of sky