(After he’s treated an estuary according to his technique, infusing the substance of the bank with powders and liquids, chucking them out of the back of his old tug to the derision or disgust of the more swish local river-users, when the tide goes out and the mudline is revealed it spells out words in a line of sloppy script. That soon shuts up his neighbours. But there’s more. Those revealed letters stretch and slur as gravity tugs the silt, of course, but they don’t simply become shapeless runoff. Instead, they morph from one word to another, to a third, sometimes to a fourth before they finally give up any semblance of legibility and surrender into muck. Kids play among them like mudlarks in Victorian times, looking for treasures, and the words crawl away from their feet. They always seem random. Gibbon, might say the waterline, changing to spur, then irenic as the river thins to a creek.)