they just seem a little weird..." -Cheap Trick
On the roof, I
recline. Empty soup bowl and water bottle beside me. The sunset is in
its final, bruised mutability. Something black soothes from west to
east across my view - a heron. Higher than the trees and I, for
a moment she is perfectly silhouetted. All of her long lines compact, neck into her shoulders, legs a perfect line
behind her, elegant like the river she is scouting.
She leaves me,
promptly. I consider why I would ever be thinking of somewhere else.
Why would I want to be elsewhere now, if I could not be looking at
those golden flanks easing to the south, and their evergreen brows,
polished with a lazy, sultry sun. Incoherent, the clouds swill across
the valley in many forms. Long white evening gowns, damp infantry,
children's happy footprints. I think of the scientists who decided to
catalog clouds, spent their days watching and drawing and came up
with a handful of prefixes and suffixes [to similar scientists we can also attribute the concept of a black body, a form that absorbs all of the
light that falls upon it. A concept which, like many scientific
ones, is difficult to find in reality. The queen
of all black bodies is that big pearl in the night sky].
Sign me up for the
cloud job. I want to watch clouds all day. Each day can have its own
classification.
The air still smells of rain. The birds like to remind each other all day that we've had some precipitation.
And the colors. These cloudy Missoula sunsets never cease to draw the
sinful pigment right out of the sky and leave a purity, of paleness,
of blues yellows and pinks like secret shells trying to hide beneath
the sand. A silence in color, to counter the raucous clouds.
I reach back and
put my arms behind my head. Off my right elbow, the sun continues its
descent. Off my left, the moon pulses, sporadic behind the dancing
clouds.
Today, I have
decided to surrender. It seems to me, that we are all demi-gods of
some kind, walking between our god self and our pygmy self, as Gibran says. That which is made of stars and that which is made of earth. Between the sun and the moon, as I am now. For a while I have
been striving to be as the moon – to reflect, to receive. Not like
the sun, rampantly producing, mindlessly stimulating. It is requiring
a lot of energy to be a black body, to draw in all that is incident
upon me. But I am not the moon, nor the sun, and today I
confess that, relinquish control. Today I throw in my lot with all of
us, I surrender to the selfish glory of what we can make and how mad
we can be, surrender to a nature perpetually off kilter, for if it
were not how would anything continue. Cede to the waxing and
waning of that chalice in the sky, and feel that it is alright. I am
not the sun or moon. I am both.
 |
| A Zoo Sunset |
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