Desert Writings 4: Passing wind (snrch)

Written at Hugh River, morning of Day 3

Hear the wind moving up from behind us, moving through the leaves like a being, like a creature with intent, passing on having felt everything with its mouth the way a baby does, with its breath, with its everywhere fingers, with the nerve endings of its fluid skin, knowing and gathering more knowledge all the way, from leaf-swing and feather-ruffle and movement of strand of hair, from solid dimpled thigh of tree-trunk and from stone after stone lodged in the river bed in its colour and mass, each a small head in the crowd, each a shape of its own, all saying, all speaking themselves. All the things that can be moved and all the things that cannot, the wind passes over, passes on from.

Now, it pushes through the leaves of the farthest-forward trees, and calls back to another part of itself: Yes, it’s all right to blow here; come in, and welcome; feel this, feel that; tangle in this one’s hair; dandle the sand off this peak; smooth this smooth rock as I did. Where will we go now, then? What shall we move on to?