I need to go underneath the soft covers into the thoughtless dark, into blindness where touch is paramount. Need to feel skin and bones and hair, curlicue shapes and soft lobes, sinews of neck and arm muscles, long lengths of femur and shin, to touch toes, to find silkiness or bumps, rough flesh and hairs, crinkles and folds. But all interlocking, no space between me and them.


No east, no sunrise. The stars and planets are static. Has the earth stopped spinning? Will we all fall off? Clouds are still moving but in the wrong direction. A wind is blowing strongly from the north-east and the clouds are mixed. Some are like buildings - tall, curvy confections. Some are horizontal strips. And some are fluffy escapees from bigger structures. A tree creaks.
 
Now that it’s never night, we are losing our reason. The cows and the horses are bewildered and don’t know how to sleep. Rabbits expecting twilight are disappointed and growing thin. They have no proper time for eating. Cats have come up from their urban places and bask in sheltered spots, then catch butterflies and moths to eat, but the shrews and mice are hiding. Far away a train hoots its two-tone sound, so we are somewhere in the centuries of train, and things are still running to some sort of timetable. Who might be travelling at a time like this when our whole world is altering and could die.
 
South. The dying man on the dry grass. His lungs are failing. The air won’t flow. And his blood is slowing down. Everything about him is parched. He’s fast-forwarding into death, shrivelling in front of our eyes. But he has no injury; there is no blood. He’s just ceasing and draining. His eyes are open but seem unseeing and the blue-ness of them is fading into the whites. His mouth is a gaping dry hole. The stubble on his chin is bleached and the skin is grey. His fingers grasp bonily at the grass stalks. How important is his death? All the time we are figuring out the significance of things. A piece of crumpled paper blown by the wind lands on the grass. On it is some writing – a message from one child to another. They had to meet in a garden to talk about their friendship. Is this as important as the dying man? Or more? A tree creaks, moving against itself in the wind. A dry soundtrack to the silent rasping of the dying man.