Tiny worlds

For all my listening I cannot see her, and for all my looking I can only hear her.  A strange thing, this native brush, this overgrown hedgerow as it were, this deluge of verdant cover that enchants sound with that strange otherworldly presence gifted of echoes.  Somewhere between leaves time floats, a specter draped over branches that hide and reveal that which must be hidden and revealed.

Royalty she is, attending her birthright dutifully.  I hear her as she builds, her cellophane wings scraping the air like dry leaves, like parchment even, and in that tiny jungle that spans countless countries, in that paces-long space that cannot be walked, she hides in the shadows that cloak so many things.

Each turn of my head reveals the sound has moved, her efforts shifted to this leaf or that branch, yet it is not she who moves, nor is it her building that trundles along a seascape of forgotten foundations not too dissimilar from her own.  Nay, only the sound moves, never seen but only heard, a confounding riddle built on where is and answered with not here.

She remains busy throughout my failed spying, the buzzing here and not here, there and not there, always moving, always shifting, always above then below, always left then right, and never in front of me.  Amongst the dapples of sunlight and the whispers of breeze, in a tiny jungle that stretches eons, her only spectator watches blindly, listening to that which exists in a dream.

For all my listening I cannot see her, and for all my looking I can only hear her.

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