Lonely as a cloud The end is distance. A day too great. You are surpassed. Your steps cannot be equated with such immensity. You sit on the track, waiting. You do not ask yourself why you wait - exhaustion is its own answer and there could be no justification of all this silence. A single tree shades you from noon. It is as though you have achieved some irredeemable godhead; as if all your life you have striven for this isolation. Detail distracts you: even out here, crows live - their black drift through enormity. Ants. Beetles. Grass. You cut across a paddock, thinking to save some miles. They will find first your swag, then you clothes abandoned. The cities have a more subtle way of death. How white your skeleton will be, naked, picked clean, in the next summer's furnace solitude. How marvellously simple - the white bones, the orange grainy texture of the plains, blue millennia. You are pleased by the stylisation of your death. The crows, too, express interest; also the ants.

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