We tug through birches hazing the heath's edge
then down aimless curving horse tracks,
trousers snatched at by gorse and cross-leaved heath.
Greg powers ahead, stops stiff-legged
on a sandy mound. Behind him
two oak saplings lean; their end-of-summer
waxy leaves, as stiff as postcards, scrape some more
then stop. He grates the bristles under his chin.
We listen as the day's sound is a canopy
trundled away on the small wheels
of blackbirds chopping out alarm calls, pigs
skirling, distant tractor bearings shaking loose.
What's left is a hush: an almost-silence, sky-wide
and gauzed with the hiss of information channels
underused. Sea shells. Tinnitus.
Our breath occupies us. Dusk granulates.
As Greg slowly scans the heath
I turn and shadow him, breathe his air.
'I really hope they're here' he says
'You've got to see this', but we don't discuss
the silence which tightens like the skin of a drum.

Then a buzz that might only be air passing in my throat.
Greg stills me with a grip; we're locked and listening now.
Another low trill swells and steadies,
a modem crooning to its server,
till it hits and holds the note
that makes the heath vibrate.
The sound revolves and grows, spools
coagulated words, garbling
flickering out epileptically fast,
their meaning blurred but insistent.
They are singing a roll-call, a chain of hyperlinks
that jolts us to other heaths, scrublands, wastelands:
wide open, unremarked places, kept behind fields,
stored with the sunsets, pinned through with railtracks,
bald patches within the dark fur of pine trees;
or places that reach out as sandy embankments,
road verges seeded with buddleia
and shepherd's purse, rubble yards,
the unwatered edges, the dry listening points,
empty and under-developed,
the arid relief which we've no need to notice,
the blank spot, the white between words.

The chain breaks. The sights disappear.
We see nothing, but the nightjars' churring
rolls back a path which we follow
through the random scrub and the dark
which has come down so suddenly.