#bye canada

1. On that night we heard distant music. It began just as the sky was darkening from purple into black: like a wave, as the night went on, the music seemed to come closer until it seemed to be all around us, but there was no discernable source. Either nothing or everything was singing.

2. On that night too the moon blushed yellow-green. It was the colour of forests growing, though nobody could go up to the moon to check. I had on my shelves stories of moon-forests and they were crystalline, or glassy, or whispering full of silver birches, or wrapped in snow. But the moon had beat them all. It knew the forests it wanted and at last it had them. They puffed their oxygen into space, withered like moths and were gone the next morning, but they had left their root-marks behind.

3. On that night, the stars came down from the sky and walked around in the park; up close, they were shaped a little like cats, and they mostly did not set the trees on fire. The fixed stars and the wandering stars were there both. Chief among the wanderings stars was Mars, and when I had got my courage up I went into the park and asked them: didn't we put a rover on you? Mars looked at me with unmeetably-bright eyes and pointed to a spot on their lower back. A tiny rover was indeed visible there, like a flea.

4. On that night you could pass a hook up into the sky and pull down some of its darkness in diaphanous layers. Down near the ground it got colours. It hung about like drifting clouds or silk or as if we were in a rainbow kelp forest breathing in some impossible ocean. When it snagged on the stars it made fireworks.

5. On that night we came across the dead; they had opened the doors of their graves, they were taking tea together and playing chess, they had wrapped the sky around their shoulders and they were content. When they had finished the tea they went back in. The cups lay in the graveyard until morning, when magpies carried them off to furnish their nests.

6. On that night the wind was warm and smelt of honey, and at sea it blew ships to lost harbours.

7. On that night the trees passed notes. They swapped leaves, trying on each other's clothes and posing in the tower-block mirrors. They handed over their own personal squirrels and songbirds so that the other trees could nestle them in their branches, and the other trees in turn gave advice on how to turn towards storms and songs against lightning. By morning every tree had made at least six new friends.

I’m going home today…