In cartoon worlds, if you’re struck on the head the small birds that encircle your scalp are known as a “halo” or “circling birdies”—a cartoonist’s motif or trope or idiom.

Trope is misused in the context and idiom bent to fit the warped view the sufferer is perceiving. At the top of the block late this afternoon, four or five yellow-

rumped thornbills, electric between lucerne and eucalypts, suddenly flocked about my head and began circling, or encircling—making me dizzy with long shadows pulling my feet

out from beneath me, their shattering tiny glass voices enticing yet repellent. I thought of Hartnett’s “Necklace of Wrens” which I could only partially recollect and even

now can’t quite configure, while realising it had something to do with the order of words, and that I would have to draw on all composition to gently break free of their wreath.