Rounds

Late at the wedding somebody started a round in the kitchen, the one about the bells, and the second voice came in on cue, then the third, and for a while the room went round itself like water round a drain that never quite empties. Then people peeled off for coats and taxis, and each time the tune came back there were fewer of us to carry it, until it was only my cousin's girl at the sink, half asleep, singing the first line again, as if nobody had sung it yet.

There's a small moon over Mars that comes up in the west and crosses the sky the wrong way, twice a day, and is falling, not fast, a couple of metres a century, a rubble heap held by habit. One day the pull will shred the weak parts into a ring, and the hard parts will come down low and slow, like someone sitting on a bed. And some people do the sums and say: it's been here before. A ring that rained most of itself onto the plain and gathered the rest into a smaller moon, which fell, and rang, and gathered, three times, maybe seven, the tune coming back each time with fewer voices.

So when you ask where it came from, I want to ask which verse. The heap doesn't have one beginning. It has an entry, and entries. This morning a ship went up from an island off Kyushu to bring home ten grams of it, and in ten grams, if the sums are right, there'll be a few dozen grains that were never moon at all, bits of Mars knocked up into the sky and caught there, dust from the floor of the room.

The girl at the sink stopped, and looked round, and asked who started it. Nobody could say. Everyone had come in after someone. She sang it again anyway, from the top, the way you do.