Mother died just before they first arrived. An arrival in return for a departure. I’d rather have had mother than the ducks but we take what we get. Besides, one does not really have anyone. Language anchors us to people in this way. Verbs, in the present tense at least, allow us to believe that we have ownership, that we belong. But we own little and seldom belong. I had a mother. I had a father. How much life that word ‘had’ contains. The illusion is that words speak us. Translate us into the world, for we are in our essence beyond language. Like ducks we are migratory souls and words are not our first language. A puddle catching the reflection of a few stars does not reflect the cosmos. There is such space within us and we pin it to a word here and there and believe we have spoken. It is maddening. So we have craftsmen and women who work to release the interior world. But, they must make do with words. They take what they can get.

My son once let go of a helium balloon and it lifted quickly into the sky. We are like the air in that balloon. Air in air, little and incomprehensibly vast, waiting to burst. Frantically naming the world before we do. What are words but air compressed through pipes, over chords, nudged with a tongue through a cavity? But they signify the world.

The last words mother spoke were garbled. The tubes distorted her. The words travelled 6000km. One expects clarity to be compromised. The conversation haunts you still. It was to be the last. And you, her son, did not hear her. Is it worse not to hear or not to see? How deaf, how blind have you been to everything else? Now you overcompensate. Listening too hard and hearing what is not there. Seeing what is not there. Looking, the way a blind man looks for Braille. Cautiously, fumbling but determined. Like the day the ducks came (oh you make me smile). You were looking at the rain pock-pattern the pool. You were staring right at them but not seeing them until one moved and you saw it was not a shadow. The world was all shadows then. It still is. We had never had ducks land in our pool. Mother had never died before either, not physically, not as quietly. There it was. Death, then ducks in the rain. Your Braille. But you could not read it.

So, they weren’t just ducks after all, were they? We find ways to pull the dead back. So it is with the ducks. There were three of them. The following year they arrived again, stayed a short while and left. The year after that there was another death and they arrived. This year they arrived early, and stayed. No one has died yet. There are two of them. The first became Columbus. He must have taken a wrong turn. There are other, better bodies of water than our swimming pool. We fed them their daily bread but discovered even low carb bread is bad for them. Of the poultry feed (duck feed is unobtainable) they eat the corn, oats and barley but left the field peas (brown marbles that are now everywhere) and wheat. Though cautious, they would eat from my hand. The second one is Lady Godiva, though I suspect she is the he. Nevertheless, they are a pair, whatever they are. The dogs and cat accepted them, they paid little attention to them, except when they were fed and then hovered close by hoping to catch something they could eat.

Then, just as suddenly as they arrived, they are gone. Columbus and Lady Godiva, flown away with their names and everything. They were (do I say were or are?) Pacific Black Ducks, their proper name. As I say their names, Columbus and Lady Godiva, there is a sense of a relationship, a cosy illusion. Strange things ducks. They took to the air like mother and that balloon. Maybe that’s why I look up so much, there’s a history up there.