The Peacock at Alderton

Nothing to tell why I cannot write in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this latter acknowledgement: the self that counts words to a line, accountable survivor pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk, less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel to Prospero's own knowledge. In my room a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt to describe them, as if for evidence on which a life depends. Except for the eyes they are threadbare, the threads hanging as from a luminate tough weed in February. But those eyes—like a Greek letter, omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl; like a shaved cross section of living tissue, the edge metallic blue, the core of jet, the white of the eye in fact closer to beige, the whole encircled with a black-fringed green. The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine at the garden end, in blustery twilight his lambent cloak stark as a warlock's cape, the maharajah-bird that scavenges close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.