When evening falls purple-n-blue on Sawfish Ridge, you can hear them ghosts paddling 'round the cracked clay-bed that used to be sea. Scritch, scratch, there they go, shell-crisp bodies scraping on dry ground; stilled insect-wriggles and disappeared bug-faces. Not even bones is left, cause the mudslide didn't kill em quick enough.
Hobble, they might say, if you can understand the language, Come, we are moving out now.
Oh, no, no, Hobble says; I am an old man, and this is my mud-pot; here I will stay.
Oh, grandfather, say the tiny voices in chorus. But we will miss you!
Miss you, echoes the desert wind, so lonely it'd break your heart. Miss you ...
Now the sun is nothing but a sliver and the stars start to show. Then you think: them stars is the same the ghosts saw, way back in the Old Days. And that is comforting, it is. The ghosts, maybe, are bedding down now, burying ridged bodies in the once-mud, stirring up the salt still left in the dust, twitching feelers to the West. Goodnight, goodnight, they say, and then they are silent.
The wind's got no words now, just a language with no alphabet, like tears or desert ridges, that only the heart can understand. And in the sleep-breathing of the ghosts, maybe you'll hear it, too: sighs, laughs, groans that no letters'd do justice to. But if you tried, maybe it'd be something like this:
Flood the swamps with knowledge, and the sea with peace. Come paddling, little fisherman; You'll show us the way; When the stars all drip with honey and strivings cease: Walk upon the waters, and swim upon the clay.
The sun's gone, sunk away West. Grandfather Hobble, you say, and, scratch-scratch-scratch in the shifting dust, he's listening. Grandfather Hobble, teach me to read the books all wrote in mud, teach me to be small and silent and bugeyed, in the dark-n-salty sea.
And then you hold the dust tight to your chest, waiting for an answer.
