every wing a rumination

This mood is only a temporary encampment, a place to patch sore feet, a place to spend the night. Soon it will only be the scorch marks on stones and the scuff marks left by boots. The scoring of tent stakes, a layer of soil blanketing damp ash. But for the moment it is home, as much a home as any true transient ever adores. Fair or foul, this is where the moment lies. Stormy or starry, these skies will drift by just the same.

From the daybreak squabbles of hummingbird and bee, to the remnants of empty palaver that ring the dusk, the day has stretched and faded. The heat has wandered into the yard and my routine of day light sleeping was thick and marbled with frantic dreaming. Sweat soaked pillows and the dusty beating of an electric fan. The creaky stirrings of another afternoon alive mixes with the memory of a moth beating puffs of dust from a reading lamp. Sometimes every light is the moon. Every wing a rumination.

The westerly roaming of the sky, stars striking spark and notion, the moon stuck in the sharp limbs of a sleeping tree. Every thought half wish, half realization. The jangling nerve song of uselessness. The cavalier expression mortality makes once it is stuck on a fence. That lost night, that carefree gloom that lit into the leavening breeze, gone like every memory of hope. Happy, sad, angry, lonely, or the utter ravenings of despair: they wander the firmaments like any other planet, strange and distant and momentarily urgent beyond telling. Here, then there, then gone again. A campsite chat about nothing but the weather while the climate slowly changes course, the journey certain that it can wait until morning comes again.