hint

Just a hint of the hummingbird in the bottle brush, a shiny blur flecked in the corner of an eye. Just that glint of metal in the dusty bush, a tiny whir of unseen wings. All the evidence is manifest in these slips and whispers, dollops of light in motion, trails of implicit speed. The dead leaves and pine needles are spread in the spatter of light dripping through pools of shadow, not so much object and opposite as thing and absence. That life and death polarity, that argument that is always one way. The day is splayed on an easterly wind, as if drawn by the moon that isn't there. As if bourn upon the firmaments of dusk.

And so the smile is coated with dust and gnats, a grit of spit and suspended protein, enzymes and subterfuge, a swallow that transcribes names and natures. Clouds of tiny flies envelope the air around the fallen fruit, the scent of peaches tilting into a kind of cloying sickness. Every breath is persuaded, every cough cast in refute. The dull dry sky wallows a few wavelengths apart from any color trapped upon the earth. Aim taken from the direction of the color of fire, of a horizon melting across the canvas, upon this spell of steel and gold. That cloying, sneaking grin, that primate sneer of warning and fear substituted for mimicked submission, that alligator grin over crocodile tears reveals the will to devour.

Amid these waning hours, the drizzled words pool and bleed. The oily rainbows of rhetoric that shimmer in each convoluted glower, the shower of sound and symbol mistaken always for the very thing they hide. These shared reflections that flavor our souls, the shimmering meanderings of ions sprayed or gases heated, these numb descriptions turned to shadows, ideas that think they are immune to being. The thing seen is past abstracted, is pulse and impulse, spark and shadow, bone and ghost. The world tumbles again and again, swaying in the sun and the darkness. It spins and tows us in its awful wake, muddling our dreams with these waking moments. Everything painted in our breath and mistakes. Everything mistaken for just missed wings.