Someone's garden. A blue sheet of tarpaulin coils and folds and unfolds in the wind like a flag. It's attached, somehow, to a brick verandah. There are lots of shadows although it is midday. Maybe there are clouds or maybe my view is obscured by dahlias and hollyhocks and ferns.

I believe the tarpaulin is a person, wrapped in a blue coat, moving weird and fluid. I believe this then I don't. For a moment, between knowing what it is and knowing it is something else entirely, I don't know what to believe.

I'm sitting at a table in a different garden. Today, writing in a different place to yesterday. Writing is a way of accessing whatever was there, or wasn't there, before, countless times, before.

Before me, a solid wall of early evening sun advances across the table as the star dips beneath the shield of the parasol, but as it dips it becomes complicated by the trees and bushes beyond the fence, and so the wall of sun is solid but thinning. Soon, the sun will be too low in the sky for it to be free of branches, canopies, epiphytes and clustering vines. It will be pocked and dappled, stripped of its original form by the time it reaches me.

I can feel it on the edge of the page. As I write, my arm moves into the sun, and then back out, the start of a new line. You will have to trust me. This is what's happening. I have a baseball cap on, not because the sun is in my eyes, but because the reflection of the sun is in my eyes. When we say 'reflections of the sun' we usually mean reflections of intensity, rather than reproductions of a distinct, specific shape.

It's hot in the shade, the citronella candle was a pool of wax before I even lit the wick, and beyond the shade you are forsaken. I imagine pools of scented wax in the underworld, vast as a burning sky at the bottom of everything. They attract and repel the largest, hungriest of bugs, and souls.

I believed the blue tarp was a human and then I didn't. This was somewhere before yesterday. I thought it was something it wasn't, then I didn't know what it was, or what to think.

What do we see when we see something and we don't know what it is? This must happen all the time when you're a child. When was the last time you saw something totally unrecognisable? And why, when nothing we see has ever been seen before, not in this moment of time and space, not from this angle, under this particular collapse of light, do we always act like we know what we're seeing?

There were no people in the garden. I watched. No people. In this garden, there is only one person. There are countless beings. I wish them well and sometimes I kill them. I can not predict. The candle has gone out but there's no wind, just an ocean-underworld of wax. It slops up the sides of the candle holder like bathwater, hot and unruly, but only if you tilt it. Otherwise, still and smoky as a mill pond.

I drive to the airport and things that have fallen from the trees in the early thick summer rain move on the road as if they're alive and they could be.

Earlier, I ran and almost got heat stroke and then walked but the sun was still there.

I just heard a bird that sounds like a telephone. I'd like to invent a bird that sounds like someone far away from a telephone.

Some of this happened on different days, but now it is happening all at once for the first time.

The utter majesty of clouds. What a dreadful thing to say, but it's true. Couldn't I put it somehow somewhere else? The sky is big enough to swallow our eyes every day but we never let this happen.

I sit in the cellphone parking lot of an international airport and I let the sky take my eyes. I don't care, in this moment, how my eyes are phrased.

Part of a leaf just fell like a line of birds. How do you know it wasn't a whole leaf?

I sat in the dark of a cellphone lot and how do I make this happen?

In the sky there are configurations of clouds which look like purple coastlines. You can picture inlets and bays and the gentle white lace of waves against distant cliffs. The clouds move slow enough that you can pretend they're still as land, so long as you don't look too long. If you stare at them, or look away and stare at something else and then look back, the clouds are pulled apart, stretched like dough. You have to pretend they're something else. The clouds are incinerated.

I remember being in a car with a father and son, somewhere near Auckland. When I picture the moment, I picture only them. I'm not there at all, which is impossible, because I saw it with my own eyes. The moment doesn't exist without me. The boy was about five years old and I was in my twenties and the father was about to get divorced. I couldn't drive. Was I in the back seat? When the scene unfolds I see it from the back seat, but surely the man would have made his five year old son sit there? We stopped near an airport. Did we get out of the car? The father wanted to show his son the arcs of passing planes, touch-downs and lift-offs in the purple dark. Planes approach from one direction and depart in another, to avoid collisions. Is this true? Must pilots always approach a landing strip the same way? Is it better to have sun in your eyes when you're taking off or coming down? They must have a way of staring directly into the sun. How else could you safely fly?

I don't think it's possible to think of flying and the sun and not think of melting wax wings, a young boy going out like a candle in the air over the sea.

I watched the father show his son the planes as they passed through. He had been arguing with his wife all day and all through the previous night. There had been a party and someone broke a glass and someone's child had thrown a sofa cushion into an open fire. Everything was an accident. I was staying at the house and had decided not to drink but I was chain smoking. There was a projector screen showing a rugby match. People kept trying to give me beer. Have you ever stayed in the house of a family that's falling apart, a family you've never met before? All the adults shouted late into the next morning. From the outside it sounded like fun but from the inside it sounded like something else, or was it the other way around? I guess some things must be another way. The father swept the patio after the guests had disappeared and at night he took his son to see the planes taking off and I was there, too. We were on our way to somewhere else. Isn't this always the way?

I consider taking a photo of the sky above the airport, but everyone knows that cameras, no matter how powerful, never do justice to the sky. It's because the sky is too big. It's really that simple. The moment you reduce it's size to fit a frame you reduce it's power accordingly. It doesn't matter how large the image. It will never suffice. I watch a plane descend and predict it's the one I'm waiting for. I could choose to wait for any plane, in theory. What would it feel like to wait for a plane chosen arbitrarily?

They've installed portable toilets in the cellphone lot, to dissuade taxi drivers from pissing in the bushes. I go inside one and there's a cleaning schedule tacked to the plastic ventilation shaft. Every time maintenance staff come to clean the cubicle, they record the date. I take a photo of this service record instead of the sky outside. The sky is always reduced by photos, but perhaps the cleaning schedule will be enlarged, somehow, when it appears here.