Sleep, my favourite flannel shirt, wears thin, and shreds, and
birdsong happens in the holes. In thirty seconds the naming
of species will begin. As it folds into the stewed latin of
afterdream each song makes a tiny whirlpool. One of them,
zoozeezoozoozee, seems to be making fun of sleep with
snores stolen from comic books. Another hangs its teardrop
high in the mind, and melts: it was, after all, only narrowed
air, although it punctuated something unheard, perfectly.
And what sort of noise would the mind make, if it could, here,
at the brink? Scritch, scritch. A claw, a nib, a beak, worrying
its surface. As though, for one second, it could let the world
leak back to the world. Weep.
~ from Night Field (McClelland & Stewart, 1992)
