 I meet Louise, and I’ve got the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch in the bag the Taoist nun at Xining told me would always feed me luck, the one with the yellow-green bird streaming from mere being. On the lefthand side of Hui Neng’s book, old characters like the lost forest north of Chang’an, people moving in it, soft-mouthed older people, catching birds with long poles and string. We go to see The Apostle, Robert Duvall. In the film, Duvall has Motion balled in his hand: he looks at it then us, quickly, back and forth through the film. Duvall’s on a roll; what he’s doing is rhythmic and ugly; he’s always musical, bucking, but you can’t be sure what you see inside. Sometimes a room that someone’s just left, sometimes a garden of machines. I want to write about human brightness coming into the world, out of the water in the ground and into the world. Hiddenness appears in everything. It lifts out of the chest of everything toward you, elm shade, wheat, a river, late grass. Come in, it says. Where have you been? You could say that when Louise and I sit there watching the film we are being thought by the dark. It says what it needs to say. The tongue casts its shadow but the mouth is bright. A Word from Tim Lilburn about "Shouting" In “Shouting,” I go to a film with the poet Louise Halfe. It’s The Apostle, where Robert Duvall plays a fundamentalist preacher of uncontrolled conviction and barely controlled violence. Louise comes out of residential school; I am an ex- Jesuit; it seems to me that Duvall had some fierce religion in his past. None of this information appears in the poem, but it adds pressure. As we, two friends, watch the spectacle – Duvall shouting – the night moves around us: some large thinking is breaking up like ice sheets on the river. Excerpted from Kill-site by Tim Lilburn Copyright © by Tim Lilburn. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.