Noel Rowe

For Bluthorpe another day
has begun badly. The morning news
includes the story of another American shooting kids,
then himself, this time an Amish school and seven girls,
five of whom have died. He let the boys go free.
Someone, perhaps a police psychologist, a journalist,
or even a stranger passing by, explains it all:
some twenty years ago he molested girls;
it's a way of blotting out his sin. There's a note
to this effect, written to his wife, who says
this is not the man I was married to, he was kind.
Bluthorpe, who has been known to complain
about the tendency he sees in American culture
to justify self-expression as if it were a basic
human right, wonders how long it will be before
there's a film made of this insanity and which child
actors will be asked to simulate the innocence
of Amish girls who'd never seen a gun before this
ejaculated death at them. Perhaps it's just as well because
as news it sure aint getting a whole lot of notice; already
it's being consigned to yesterday's bin, along with revelations
from a respected journalist that the American government
was warned about September 11 before it happened. Viewers
in the meantime are being asked to vote
on-line: do they or do they not think
the war on terror has increased our status
as a target and have they finally had enough of celebrities?
Bluthorpe, whose idea of a celebrity is Bette Davis,
all cigarette and diction, not the local weather man,
thought ricotta cake and coffee might elevate his mood,
even though his doctor is concerned about his intolerance
to sugar. So now he's sitting in the one café he can rely on,
having had his cake, and is halfway through his coffee, when
the broad and breakfasting businessman he'd seen chatting up
a pretty blonde assistant gets up to pay. He should have seen
it coming, that out of control shoulder bag, no doubt
full of apprehended violence orders, clipping his cup
until it runneth over, with froth and fluid on the article he's been reading
by an Australian politician who says
he'd like to bring Christ back into politics.
Listening to the businessman ordering him another cup,
Bluthorpe decides if Christ is anything like he imagines him
to be, he'll have more sense than to accept the offer.
...

For Jim Esler
Yes, Simeon, there was sorrow, but much fun
too, when he set about making contradiction.

I should have known: for when the glorias first were sung,
it was to celebrate my son, born among the dung.

Ever since, I've been hearing heaven's laughter.
Cana's newly-weds, absorbed in what was coming after,

did not even notice how the water changed its mind.
The Pharisees got a holy shock as a man born blind

told them if they didn't get a hold on their desires,
so taken up with Christ, they'd land themselves among his followers.

Sacred irreverence. It is a gift to those found free
in the spirit. Even Zaccheus found it in himself, up a tree,

and Lazarus, sauntering around in his shroud.
There was a time too when, expecting stones, a crowd

got instead some bread and fish. I heard a thief steal
his way back to paradise. The structure of the real

is mercy. Having seen so many reversals,
I should have known he would test his muscles

on the stone, and walk away from the dazed
grave, leaving its mouth open and amazed.


From Magnificat
...

Bangkok never really sleeps, it turns
it seems endlessly in and out of streets
that once were klongs, but now

are fierce cement, where motorbikes and cars,
quick and greedy, grasp each other's fumes.

You lay awake and watched his back,
hoping there to find a place where beauty was
invincible, but saw instead the rise and fall of breath.

He spoke of love, water buffaloes and going home,
and if you know now
it was a lie, do not hate him, there isn't time.

Today, when you visit Wat Phra Keo
to see a Buddha carved green as deep water,
you'll hear the wind release the temple bells:

Ani'chung. Impermanent. There isn't hate,
isn't love. Ani'chung. There isn't time.

Ani'chung, ani'chung, ani'chung.
...

The morning news reports another massacre,
Australia's first (or so they say). Port Arthur:
stones that might have housed
a monastery at prayer had they not
been packed for retribution, and so
ready for the man, the semi-automatic scene,
the thirty-five who died considering the violence of the past.
"Australia's Greatest Massacre", they say, as if size mattered,
as if the man who soaks a boy, a six-year-old, in petrol,
then takes a lighted match and touches him,
has somehow made a smaller madness.

After this the news is of Zaire: civil war and famine
fierce enough to turn stomachs into dust and wire.
The cameras grab enough to keep ‘emergency' alive:
packs of food are raining down like hope,
an old woman stealing flour from a teenage boy
is being beaten till she gives it back, he has a votive leaf
of blood clinging to his lip, another woman crawls
after powdered milk while, strapped across her back,
her baby looks the world straight in the eye.
In the south of France the press interview
the President. He hasn't quite decided yet
if he'll permit the charities to help, but he has
a gold chain around his wrist and a seaside smile.

Pathfinder, meanwhile, has been launched to see
if ever there was life on Mars. The probe will land
a rover, sixty centimetres long, to move
across the planet's surface, sampling soil. A scientist explains
he's long believed that life, intelligent life,
is not confined to earth. Bluthorpe isn't sure
about that word ‘intelligent'. He sometimes thinks
Mars could be the planet humans wrecked before
moving on to earth, and now wonders if that is why
the red planet, as it watches them approach,
is as patient as a landmine in a Cambodian field.
...

Could it be
the hills have learned patience
enough to lie lightly on the sea,
not to cling, instead to make their touch
complete with emptiness, as a dancer's hand
will train the air to wait, will borrow beauty just
for a while, then, wiser than the thieves who tried
to steal the moonlight, throw it back.

Could it be
the fishing boat
has netted peace:
red, white and weathered,
it's sitting on its haunches like amusement,
as motor scooters pass it by with noise and speed.

Could it be
as simple as the Buddhist monk's instruction:
while the mangy kitten stretched itself,
hair by hair, along a careless stroke of sunlight,
while a hazy green untied the room and trees
until the mind had lost its hold,
while his loose arms moved easily, as pity might,
asking ignorance to put its power down,
while his hand, attentive, touched his glass
as if to keep its water cool, while his eyes
were opening suddenly corridors calm with bronze,
he said a single word: ‘Impermanence'.
And laughed. It sounded like a shell
breaking.

Could it be:
the clear-hearted sea.
...

They were older then, like their kitchen floor,
linoleum and love worn together more
by each treading heart. They were never sure:
had they found happiness, or simply a way to endure?

My grandfather's faithfulness was tough and taciturn.
Builder and fisherman, he did not learn
patience, except for fish. He's hook his fingers in the air,
alive with cigarettes, and catch its burning as ashes in his hair.

His eyes were full of stories we never dared
disbelieve. Looking back, I think he cared,
at least as best he could,
his hands hard with working over water and wood.

Every time we visited, my grandmother gave
us scraps. "For the dogs," she'd say.
Staying in love; knowing how to save,
make a little go a long way.

Such a brave economy of emotion.
it was the best lesson my grandmother taught,
something we might lean on,
knowing how she'd fought

her way into believing. Her rough
knuckled rosary, her tea-towel with its thin-skinned pride,
had to be, for her, hope enough
until at last: a knocking at the door, a veil drawn aside.
...

It is a simple thing for you to light the fire
early in the morning. You take the wood,
smelling still of earth and air despite the axe,
you take the smallest pieces first, barely more
than splinters, place them cross-wise
on yesterday's discarded news, and touch it all
with your finger spreading flame until the dead words
begin to glow, and break.

Yesterday, we buried him:
and with him, more than half your life. Habits shaped
for thirty-six years of marriage hang about the house
and wonder what to do. So you, though you know
he will not need his usual cup of tea,
will get up, all the same, will touch
above the fireplace the shelf he made for you, and let
your whole sorrow hang by one hand,
then bend to make the fire,
to take its fierce shadow in your palm.
...

On this the first after many days
of illness I am able to walk,
I make my way to where I can see
the Anzac Bridge held
like a wishbone over the roofs of Glebe.
Above me clouds appear to be
a paddock that has felt the plough,
until I smell again earth being turned
at the corner of the farm,
where what we called the log paddock sits
beside the swamp, the great damp dark
in which my brother and I used to play
jungle games. Like heroes from our comic books,
we slipped between the shadows and the rushes,
swung from trees, and felt
together we could never really come to harm.
In a moment he'll arrive again
to sit beside my bed and we'll remember
eating redbill soup our mother made,
sundaes on Sundays with our father at the Greek café,
the milking stool cut from a camphor laurel branch,
and evening light putting its hands into the sides of
paperbarks.
Yesterday he brought me, for old time's sake,
a Phantom comic with a story called
"Healing Hands." It is, he tells me, a sign.
...

Thomas Merton teaches happiness
is found by those who know the fullness
in (not of) time, those who learn to be
fully present to the moment, even
listening as well as they can
to birds. This morning a magpie
takes the day by the throat. I try but
the old man next door has his ladder up
just outside the room
where I was wanting to stay asleep.
He's been painting since six o'clock
wanting to avoid the heat
getting his house ready for Christmas.
Soon his wife will call to him.
They'll talk about the colour of the paint
or what they'll eat for lunch or whether they can afford
to buy the grandchildren many gifts.
Then I'll tell myself it's time
to crawl backwards from bed and get
ready for the nurse who promised
she'd be early today. She also said
the wound is clean and healing well.
...

The problem for Lazarus is: he's never quite
come back. He can cook a proper meal, he can eat it,
but the taste isn't there, not since his tongue got itself
snagged on the flavour of something levelled, cold.
He can talk with friends, or for that matter
strangers, taking in their words as if they were angels
or emergency packs of medicine. But as they speak
he worries if they're real, if they'll crumble should
he grab suddenly their wrists and hold on a moment more
than possible. He can read a little, mostly easy fiction but even then
he finds it difficult to concentrate; after a while the writing's loose,
floating on his mind like crumbs of bread
that someone threw on water for gulls to feed on. Before
he knows what's going on there's a movement, quick,
greedy and only the water's left. Empty and nameless now
a plastic bottle goes drifting by; it's likely it once gave
energy to one of these runners making more and more
circles round the water with measured, rubbered feet.
He can sleep, but not much because he has to sit
upright in a chair, listening to his breath, surprisingly still
coming in, going out; he is afraid any moment now
his lungs will remember and give themselves back to the soft touch
of dust, lifting off the sepulchre and lowering itself over him.
He can pray a bit, in bits (perhaps, he thinks, he might himself
be a picking gull), but even though he's prepared to say
there's mystery, even perhaps miracle, at work, he doesn't dare
imagine, whatever he hopes, there's a being sometimes known
as god opening his file and taking out an answer that is kind.
And he can get himself out of bed each day, have his toast and coffee,
and wash, still trying to clear the dark from underneath
his fingernails and rub away what seem to be cinder marks
on his lips. He can get himself dressed, and head to work,
but all the time he knows his shoulders have been
turned down, taking his eyes with them.
...

My sister's staying. Things are not
where I'm used to finding them. This time
I tell myself it doesn't matter. This time
I'm the one who has been cut. The poem
I wrote for her has come back to bite me.
So she is here to help. She's already done
the garden, finishing off the jobs her sister started.
The peace lily my mother gave me when my father died
has been re-potted and is doing well beneath the camellia.
Today we walked to Market Town for a little bit of retail
therapy: DVDs and shoes. We also saw a movie called
Brokeback Mountain, which, according to the publicists,
is about gay cowboys. In fact it's more about
how love isn't always able to be
what you want.
We also watch her favourite TV shows, most of which
seem to be about the supernatural. And every now and then
she says something that lets me know how she coped
with her cancer. Keeping company, we are aware
of how living and dying reach out to each other, learning to be
at ease in my new leather lounge. It's good: we're still here
for the moment and that will have to be enough.
...

If the visitors' book is to be believed
I've been sleeping in a room a ghost
usually occupies. This week it seems
he's being merciful: the only moanings are
of tonight's storm, shaking banksias
by their scrawny necks, roughing up
the surf and slapping seaweed all along the shore
so that in the morning we will find the waves
have turned to rust. Then it will be time to leave
our last scattering of scraps for possums, kookaburras,
currawongs, and noisy mynas. The dingo
who tracked us down the lighthouse hill, making sure
he could trust us with the place, will stay
under cover of his cautious eyes and watch us go.
These quiet days away have helped
heal me. Almost as if
eating bread and prawns, drinking tea,
watching films by François Ozon
(images so beautiful and crisp I want
to take them on my tongue),
having the kind of conversations friends
of more than thirty years can have, and now and then
testing the possibilities of prayer,
has somehow offered me a chance
of touching the hem.
...

1.
Bijoux and Babs, two ladies of a kind
rarely seen in Chinon, are nevertheless
sitting in the square, having ordered drinks despite
the fact that all around them there are road works going on.
Babs has opted for aqua minerale as she is cautious and was
for a moment confused, thinking she was still in Perugia.
Bijoux, more the connoisseur, has once again gone for rickard,
as well as bread and cheese. She's telling Babs about the trip they'll take
tomorrow to Fontevraud, once a place for nuns, then criminals. Genet, she says,
was imprisoned there, and wrote Our Lady of the Flowers. Babs pretends not
to hear. She thinks there are too many homosexuals in literature. Across from her
there's a man in a wheelchair, stranded in the middle of the road works.
He must have started out along his known way to the supermarket.
Now he cannot move. Babs is so moved she spills aqua minerale
down the scarf she wears around her neck because it makes her look
like a legend of the screen. By the time she wonders if she should
help, someone has pulled the chair out and taken him another way.
Relieved, Babs looks up and there, looking back at her
is Eleanor's castle. They'd spent the afternoon discovering where
Joan of Arc had prayed, the royal dogs had slept, and the royals themselves
had eaten (Bijoux had bought a book of Eleanor's own recipes). But all
Babs had really seen was stone and grass, as stubborn as each other, so she sat
under a tree (her feet were playing up) and thought how good
Katharine Hepburn was in The Lion in Winter.
Now she notices
the trees shading the square have the most remarkable leaves.
She's trying to decide whether to compare them
to overweight moths or ceremonial fans:
very broad, almost lime green, turning brown
or heavy gold, but from the outside in,
as if autumn starts by nibbling all along the edge,
then moves in. If the French press is to be believed,
Katharine Hepburn died yesterday.
But Bijoux is still on Fontevraud:
"Their bodies, of course, were dug up and
desecrated during the Revolution, but
you can still see the tombs,
Henry, Eleanor, Richard and his wife - I forget
her name. In the chapel. Beautiful if somewhat empty.
And nearby there's a restaurant
where we can have a nice endive salad for lunch."
Suddenly Babs
begins to feel like a character from Patrick White, probably
Theodora Goodman since she starts to pat her moustache. And just
as suddenly knows by breathing what tomorrow will bring:
on the way to Fontevraud they'll see
three boats idle on the river, in an opening of trees,
as if beckoning. Bijoux will take a photograph.


2.
The rain in Paris falls
exquisitely. Or so it seems to Babs:
water pencils everything to a lovely grey;
boulevards blossom suddenly with pert umbrellas
(Lindsay Kemp couldn't stage a better show). Dry inside
Shakespeare and Company, where she's to hear a poet read,
Babs is looking across the river, wondering if Bijoux made it
safely to the Châtelet or if she'll have to listen later on to how
the sky "bucketed down, my dear, bucketed. Quite ruined
my appearance". Bijoux has gone to Mahler's Seventh, conducted by
none other than Barenboim. Babs, who never really recovered from
her Connie Francis phase, isn't much into classical so decided on
the Performance Poet, which is why she's now crawling up
a staircase made it seems of packing cases, just managing
to get a seat, a breath, a moment
to rearrange her scarf and check her purse, before the Poet is,
perhaps a bit too quickly, up and at it, arms swinging out
like a ferry on a wrinkled lake, words following:
I am a river, I cannot enter myself twice. Babs makes a note
not to read Heraclitus again. Do you think
I like carrying my heart in a basket? This belongs to what
the Poet calls her Song of the Homeless, and makes Babs
check her purse again in case a donation might be required.
I am the blue (here the Poet's cupped hand
is held as high as it will go) in heaven's pocket.
Hearing someone cry "Bravo!" at this,
Babs starts chanting under her breath:
Mahler. Barenboim. Staatskapelle Berlin. Châtelet. "As close
to perfect as you can get," said Bijoux, who knows her Mahler.
There would be no packing cases in the Châtelet, just
those trumpets, those Mahler trumpets, pulling apart
the veil of mountains, lakes and the whole underworld
of tears, till everything is revealed, everything.
Bijoux will no doubt have pressed a tissue to her lips.

Now the Mahler's well and truly started, the Performance Poet
is finishing, having turned into a finger on the trigger
of what might have been. Then pull it, honey, pull it, Babs is ready
to declare, but hears another voice, informing her the evening has
an open section. Time to go. Someone young, a little too excited
by words, stands and says she'd like to read her poem about people
who come to Paris, take photographs and miss the experience. She starts
to read and as she does the friend she's brought along whips out
his camera and takes a photograph, catching in the background Babs
heading fast for a side door she's just discovered that will get her out
onto the street, and into the rain.


3.
Bijoux, alone and quiet in the corner
of the breakfast room, is like her namesake
dressed and poised in case that photographer should
arrive. Instead she sees, spreading down the room,
a rash of students. Exchange Americans. She clamps her teeth
down hard on her baguette. They take
every last place. One of them, probably destined
for International Relations, declares a croissant
is just the same as bread, or so her mother says. Bijoux
isn't all that fond of Americans in Paris. The things she's heard
them say are things a woman of culture simply cannot
countenance. Only the other night, during interval
at a Mahler concert, she heard: "Isn't it great the way
they've made that new apartment block look old!
They've even put some gargoyles on!!" The building
under question, wrapped and scaffolded for cleaning, was
the Tour St Jacques. Then there was the day in the Rodin: she'd paused
to marvel at the way water rippling under bronze made it seem
Ugolin really was being devoured by his children, only to hear
behind her: "Oh honey, come look over here, they've got this wonderful
sandpit." And never to be forgotten, the day she and Babs had gone
to San Chapelle and found themselves eyed up and down by one
who had the air of having spread her table or her bed for presidents,
until she opened her mouth: "So, that was San Chapelle.
Let me think again, what does chapelle mean? Oh yes, that's right: hat."

And now, holy hat, they're all through her favourite hotel,
and now their teacher is calling, "Everybody up." And everybody is.
"And now we'll sing happy birthday - in English, French, and German."
And everybody does. Bijoux stirs a scum forming on the surface
of her coffee, stopping only when she sees the camera come out flashing.
This is it. No Brassai for her. She'll pass time
as that funny woman in the corner with a baquette, backgrounded
in a photo sitting on a mantelpiece in Minnesotta.
...

1.

The taxi-driver on the way from Tel Aviv
talks and laughs for his foreign visitors,
pointing out the factories where concrete is made
for export, the ancient buildings (though he himself
prefers the modern), the houses where the wealthy live
(he seems to know the price of each). He's proud
of three sons - "what little terrorists" - and a wife
who keeps his house in order, but finds it difficult
to manage on the little that he makes. Once he tried
his luck in Manhattan, but that didn't work. When asked
about his army days, he's cautious: "War's a sad business,
but you have to fight for your country." By the time
he drops us off, darkness has come down
and on Jerusalem peace
of the kind that comes with night and electricity.
So it's not until we're finally in our hotel room
taking a proper look at the business card he handed us
that we read the bottom line: "Licensed for Personal Arms."

2.

The Cardo Maximus: the street unearthed
when builders started on a new apartment block.
We stand in open ground,
sun and cats watching us, while the guide
is pointing out paving stones that Hadrian used
in 135 to start an imperial avenue in Aelia Capitolina,
the city Rome was building over what it had destroyed.
After the Romans came the Byzantines. And always
the children of Israel have been coming back,
believing there will come a time when glory
shall be on these stones and on Jerusalem
peace. History has spent a long time here, stacking
stone on stone, until a thousand years are but yesterday
come and gone. And history is not about to go away:
even now, down Hadrian's thoroughfare,
designed for showing off an army, comes a sound
that sends the cats scattering, and then a little warrior
goes speeding past, his tricycle ablaze with happiness
so entire he might just be Isaiah's child on his way
to bring the wolf and the lamb together so
they will no longer do each other any harm.


3.

"There is no trash in my street
at home," said the American,
part of a tourist group pushing its way
down the Jewish Quarter Road
near where the remains have been uncovered
of the Broad Wall believed built by Hezekiah,
who had the temple cleansed and sacrifice performed
so the Lord might send again blessing
on his people and on Jerusalem peace. That wall
held back an Assyrian invasion led by Sennacherib
who declared no god would bring him down
and was in the end murdered by his children,
but it failed to keep out Nebuchadnezzar
of Babylon who in 586 laid waste
the city - that was when the psalm was born,
the psalm of exile, the one about the Israelites being asked
to sing to their captors, the one that goes "if I forget
you Jerusalem, let my right hand wither", the one
America came to know as "By the Rivers of Babylon"
when it was a pop song and, for a while, a hit in discotheques.


4.

This morning, coming down the Mount of Olives,
I saw a cemetery. Each grave was like a slice of bread
laid down in offering and each seemed to match a stone
from the city walls, as if death and history were still
arguing which of them deserved the sacrifice, which of them
could guarantee there would ever be, on Jerusalem, peace.
"My parents are buried there," you say, "One was Palestinian."
Clearly it's a story you're not about to share. Downstairs
poets spend the farewell party talking poetry. In Hebrew,
they say, one word holds layers reaching back to Genesis,
so that ruah, the word for breath, also sets the spirit free,
the one who first persuaded nothingness to laugh and come
into the light. We agree next time I come we'll meet
in Tel Aviv and drink tea facing the sea. Maybe then.


5.

"Walk with me," said the old Arab
when we got ourselves lost
and asked if he knew
the way to the El-Aqsa Mosque.
There wasn't time to wonder if
we were about to be sold
into slavery, we were busy keeping up
as he moved through the maze of sloping stone,
taking us so close he could say,
"I have to leave you here,
just go down and turn." And so it was:
we reached the mosque and found
soldiers guarding doors
that were closed to visitors.

The very next day we took an early flight
to Paris, where we learned
fifteen Arab women had just been killed in Gaza.
On Jerusalem peace;
on the angel of difference a blessing.


6.

I shouldn't have come here expecting god
and miracles. They say there were miracles here
once. They show you stones: the one that bears
the print of Christ's ascending foot (it's here
the Arab boy tries to make me buy his piece
of olive branch and curses when I say I don't
have the proper coin): the one where Jesus prayed in agony
accepting but also asking if the cup might pass him by
(when I was young a picture of this graced the kitchen wall;
the cloak lifting from the saviour's back made me think
darkness and devils had got a hold on him and were
never going to let him go). But every stone they show
is walled about, and even the olive trees of Gethsemane,
where I thought I might for a moment lean against hope,
are fenced and safe from me: all I can do
is shove a finger through the wire, but there's no
power glancing back along my fingertips. How can spirit live
within so many walls, how reach out to anyone
passing by, how shower on them even a small kindness,
and on Jerusalem peace?
As for God: long gone,
sick of being forever groped by ideas so quarrelsome
and greedy for their truth that they would sacrifice their own
then say it's what he wanted. Miserere mei, Domine, clean
my heart, give me back not your dogmas but your great poems:
Job who dared you to turn aside long enough for him to spit;
Mary who said you had a way of looking through her nothingness;
Solomon, who roamed language and the night in search of beauty,
had the sense to liken his love to a turtle-dove and not a pigeon,
so should perhaps have thought again before writing that
her neck was like the tower of David, "built as a fortress."
Poems need the shared warmth of conversation round a table spread
with potatoes, eggplant, fish, and minted tea. They also need
to ignore boundaries and simply pass through all the doors that seem
closed to them.
Today, having lunch
next door to where they say John the Baptist was born, I looked up
from pumpkin soup and saw that the people across the way
had hung a rug out to air, had hung it over the ancient stone wall
that held their property in. Maybe, I thought, this is all the sign
you'll get; maybe this
is the bent welcome of a clean and contrite heart.
...

The street that took us every day
to hear the poets read
this morning carries on
as if we were never here
as if it was only ever interested
in selling shoes

I've taken my position
in the corner of a coffee shop
where I can watch passers by
and in a Judith Herzberg poem read
that making friends
requires not persistence but pause

She has just this morning left the city
having said when I hoped we'd meet again
life is not very long
her voice conveying not sorrow
but something that might come afterwards
the sound of being unencumbered

Looking up from her poem I see
crossing the street in my direction
a bearded man dragging his right leg
he's wearing red runners and
blossoming at his knees
a full white petticoat
...

He'd never really thought of radiotherapy in terms
of picnic lunches, Moreton Bays and a winking harbour,
but when they said, "Your machine is called
Botanic Gardens," he was happy to take them at their word.

Now every morning, early, he lies bare-arsed down
on what isn't really lawn, allowing careful hands
to lift and turn his body till
they line the tattoos up. He's done his best to be
polite: the daily courtesies, the normal humilities have become
more necessary - just before he started,
the London underground was bombed
by terrorists. "Remember," his mother used to say,
"There's always someone worse off than yourself."

They leave the room. He tries to pray, "only your love
and your grace, with these I will be rich enough."
Simplifying things. The shots begin. Soon he'll hear a sound
that lets him think of tiny birds skittering as if in trees.
After that the machine will seem to open, rustle, fold
over him, and then he'll think of angels.
...