The Judas tree stands outside my window. It filters the light from the wan sun and in the summer, the leaves act as gels for my room, tinting the golden rays a virulent green, disclosing from the warm light the aspect of freshness and acidity which is otherwise imprisoned in them. Each rasmus spreads fan-like to the edge of its circumventing frontier, and as the cool wind deadens the close of summer, stroking its nails in gently, the yellow of dying cells penetrates the spongy layer of mesophyll through the waxy lamina, percolating gently downwards to spread on the chestnut coloured underbelly of the leaf.

It is night. The moon is spattering its brightness across my floorboards, polishing the worn grooves with liquid redolence which melts into puddles, making my floor a sea, the red carpet an island, my bed a whale, beaching against its sandy bank and carrying a single passenger from a sinful past. She is innocent when she lies just as she is now, dreaming of memories severed from associations, floating delicate in a formaldehyde solution of semi-consciousness, a storm of golden hair wreathing her carrera forehead against the pillow. The shoreline of the quilt and the vastness of the sea separate her from me, and I lean against the casement, smoke writhing from my cigarette, curling along the highway beyond the bowling-pin line-up of lit-up cypresses trees which lance the horizon where she appeared to melt into the deep tinted dye of the dark.
She talked her dreams to sleep, naming all the Barbara Hepworth sculptures she knew, intoning their curves and their resonances, their textures and tactile exteriors gleaming in the moonlight on the grass in her garden when her father threw out all the art from the house, fumigating the hallways with acerbic asceticism and leaving the wood and the wire and the marble on the earth while he prowled through the rooms and heaved the Rothkos from their hangings, a supreme effort, tore the Gwen Johns from their frames and shattered the Rodin maquettes on the cobbles in the courtyards, splinters of bronze and plaster dust showering and choking the plants which had grown leisurely round the massive Moore embowered in amongst the sage and the honeysuckle which now died under the weight of his wrath and the suffocating granules which clogged their stoma while the sun beat mercilessly on them, mocking their inability to breathe, cruelly dehydrating them, and they, chloro-fully conscious of the fact that the water taken out could

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