Cockpit Country.

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Beneath the pockmarked skin of Cockpit Country, rivers are born in limestone wombs. Having been dissolved and collapsed by runoff from the hills, the terrain looks to the eye as a honeycombed eel - twisting its way through the patchwork of green - filigreed by arcs of burnished light.

Each night beneath the water's blue back, the silt is stirred and pestled into history, each layer pressed beneath a latter-day weight. Folded in that is the moon's redress and the composite cry from the trees. Paper cranes with crisp white feathers write Isis with their beaks on the bank.

The sedges turn their necks as the river emerges to carry their whispers to rushes downstream.

Logging.

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Carved like the lash of a whip on its back - is a clearing, still tender and gleaming. An islet in green seas, lapped at the fringe by blackened palm fronds and brittle ferns; the delicate wings of some fettered bird, in some cold hour of a dark mourning.

The quick start of a vibrant engine drowns the hum of the cicada's chorus, as a plume of bright macaws breaks through the upper canopy. They soar to a clay-lick and peck at its belly, as though heaven might be hidden, to be reached by digging.

I watch loggers hew a profit from slender trunks of teak, attentive like soldiers at the sharp teeth of an acute machine. The trees are grown in rows, just as their fate is determined, on a ridge between two facts: a single seed and a felling.

Copyright © Jesse Garrick, 2009