nikstar44

Back North,
headed toward the border and the sugar cane surrounds me in a thicket of dreams dredged up deep from my childhood mind.

The heavy stench of dusk settles over everything and we are driving in the half-black, lost in our own reflections and the stars above marking our way across the hemisphere, tracking upward.

We pass over, beside, around the canals that come so close as to lick the sides of our tires it seems to me, always snaking behind our progress and blocking the way forward. They are languid and thick and the surface is glassy, motionless, luring me beneath and goading me to slip in and see what lies in the backwaters of my memory. I see nothing in the looking-glass.

As dusk rolls onward the surface is spotted with tiny haloes of movement - fish coming to the surface to feed, never revealing their face or the glint of their eyes. Still, I remember them

We are gliding through a thin corridor between the dark foliage on either side of the car and suddenly everything feels quiter and more assuming, there is no breeze yet the still leaves take on anamorphic fingers and inch closer to my window. There are no tail-lights in front of us and just for a moment the dread seeps into my airways and I tighten. I choke.

Something in the black unpenetrable reaches becomes familiar to me and takes a form in slow cagey movements, slight adjustments that my eyes only half believe. I can see eyes and hands and tails now, shapes in the twilight jungle and I have an urge to approach, be drawn into the waiting arms of inky half-light and slink away into my nightmares and fears.

We come clear of the vegetation and the hills fan out behind the endless carpet of cane, each layer a different colour when caught by the fading light. I recall my school teacher helping me paint dioramas of the savannah, the earthy colours that send shivers down my arms.

I pass rough fingers over my goosebumps then look upward to the fading wash of gold and vermillion behind the black scissor-line. There are cane fires towering across the sky, noxious tangerine folds of smoke billowing away across a matte black canvas. They are snakes dancing, complicit in a metamorphosis of a grand scale, weaving and creating the night around me. My dreaming is rich and licks over the rough bumps of my tired tongue.

The roadsigns are ambiguous and no comfort, ugly and new I do not recognize them. I watch the new moon hanging over my old bedroom of earth like a buzzing light globe, Venus above it, strong and true.

I am North again.
The night reaches around and pulls me closer,
but I cannot quite hear what she is whispering to me
link