Pascale Petit

After Les Murray Inside the sandpit you are playing for your life. Your bucket and spade that smiled all day long, like family in your satchel, now work hard. Your material is sand. It weaves a universe where you are huge, the cellar behind you, eclipsed by twelve chestnut trees and their pigeon gods. On and on you burrow, into your sanctuary, devotion’s priest. There are rituals to do, like counting leaves on the sky’s loom. Any lapse and you tumble back into the brain’s forks, rick-racking the minutes for the lock that unclicks, the coffining dark, the hooded stranger with Papa’s voice, the makeshift bed.

I bring you a hummingbird’s nest, woven from seed-down, thistle head, bound with lichen and spidersilk, shaped by a mother who presses her breast against the cup, uses her rump, chin, the curve of her wing, who stomps her claws on the base to check it’s windproof under this leaf porch. The male gone, she works alone, hurrying back and forth thirty times an hour, before the eggs come. She lays them in a home small as a nutshell, the rim turned in, the sides pliant so they’ll stretch as the chicks grow. Little mother, I’ve read your file filled with letters to the mairie, begging for a place where we could live together. I know now how hard you fought the powers, like a jeweled dart stabbing at their door, before you fell prey to the jungle mantis. Instead of flowers, I leave you this nest on your grave, in case you make it from your migration — only a wisp of feathers, no flesh left on your bones.

Behind the Fauverie a crawl of quayside traffic while Aramis roars for his food, the air turbulent as he opens his jaws in a huge yawn. If I hold my breath, half-close my eyes and listen hard — there at the tongue’s root, in the voicebox of night, I might hear the almost-vanished. He’s summoning his prey, this lord of thunderbolts, calling to ghosts of the Lost World, with this evening chant to scarlet macaw, tapir, golden lion tamarin. Until everything goes slow and the rush-hour queue of scale-to-scale cars is one giant caiman basking on the bank. The jaguar’s all swimming stealth now — no sound — a stalker camouflaged by floating hyacinths, senses tuned only to the reptile of the road. Then, with one bound, spray scatters like glass, as Aramis lands on the brute’s back and bites its neck.