The Warbler

It was getting late, and under the trim of dusk a smoky gloom had shuffled down the maddening hillside. I kept writing; time went on; the pen in my hand; dear, scrambling footprints, wary, daunted by absurd space; in the midst of absent thought, lilac veins smothered by cloud, cloud smothered by the lengthening dark.

The hand crept past eleven. Half-asleep, I put down the pen and closed the book, my eyes sore beneath the pressure of empty pages. The wind was rapping at the door. I rose to hang a pot of water above the weary fire for tea. As I moved in the room, mindful of my own shadow, a draught poured through the walls in waves. I tied my gown around my waist and fastened the collar to a bare neck.

Nowhere. The word hung like a chamber organ, appalling the air as I walked to the window. A dash of rain, perhaps, fallen without my notice – no, only mottle in the firelight. The darkness had fastened. A bubbling well. Nowhere. Another twitch. Advance; revolving door. The face of a stagnant echo. She is saying to me, “Another time,” and, dreamlike, the edges of the mind flatten like clay. And if there is nothing out there, I thought, it all must be in here. A dash of rain, I thought, but it wasn’t.

The water boiled. I unhooked the pot from its place above the fire and began to pour the liquid and as I poured it blackened like the windowpane. The cup sighed with me. Letting steam tickle my mouth, I dismissed myself, the hour. Only on getting into bed did I notice my limbs ache. I sat the cup on the bedside table, uncorked the body, and watched the flames retire, dancing from the stage like fairies, languid and oblique. Outside, the ghoulish wind still blew.

I must have fallen asleep – I don’t recall – for some time later I awoke. I awoke clearly, without reason, shrugging off sleep like a damp coat. Unconscious of the cold against my face, I sat up against the headboard and pawed at the sand in the corners of my eyes. A new light held the room, a violet stupor. The desk, the chair, the bald floorboards and the yawning trunk; all containing life not within themselves but without, in their violent outline, bold as an architect’s drawing. The fireplace peered back like a dilated pupil.

I swung my legs from the bed and rustled my feet into slippers. There was wood to burn, another fire would do, I thought. Two fingers of tea left in the steel cup; I drank them, cold and bitter. Shaking my head, I stepped through the dark, my slippers hissing as I went. The firewood sat in a basket between the fireplace and the door. I bent to collect a hacked piece. There was nothing alive in the night until I heard it.

The call of a bird, plain and delicate, sounded from the window. I paused to listen, still bent there to the wall; the notes, brisk as flute music, punctuated the stillness. Each call came a few seconds after the last and ran along through time, unerring natural events spinning the crystal web in which to catch my ear, confounded. The fibres sounded clearer and clearer until a crack. Nothing more.

In two quick strides I was at the window. I searched the sill, the stony steps, the garden tree, the onrushing meadows, the pale, goading moonlight. No pair of eyes returned my gaze. Silence encroached the clock’s patter as I listened: nothing more. Against confusion, the scene of green and purple did not relent. It was a starless sky. The wind curved beneath the giant moon, a satellite soliciting devils. For all that time, I wondered.

And as I wondered, it came again, this time yet more clearly, this time unleavened by substance – it came from within the room. And as I turned, the eyes looked back. The warbler perched upon the mantle. Ornamentally it stood on two bare legs, a bulb of soft light against shadowy wood. It flicked its head in sharp turns, electric pulses, cavorting mischief. The beak, a dull ember, conducted its wary notes and then clasped shut.

I gripped my toes to the floor, wrenched close my eyelids as if to sharpen the vision. Two animals, we consulted each other’s being, rounding a tree stump in shimmering thought. And as in shimmering thought, the beak reopened: the warbler spoke. Above the pale breast, it spoke a word alien to the lucid ear, unfounded in memory but perhaps familiar to a dream. The word, divorced from sympathy, mused in night’s tender membrane. It spoke to me; it spoke still, and carried off my mind to a boundless sleep.

Nowhere. The word flies above the open space of the morning. From the bed, the room unfolds like an angel river, curiosity floats, and I can breathe the fresh air of a turned world. Dust littering bright shadow. Beyond, the open book, the empty page, alive in grey sunlight.