sparrow

They move in clusters, though each moves alone. Dust brown, a tiny crowd settles in the shadow cast upon hot asphalt. The small birds sort through the gravel, pick at twig and leaf. One lights upon a chain link fence, then another. Soon the flock fills all the empty spaces between leaf and limb, rising through the reaching tree, rising into the sky. The sparrow's flight another certainty I am stuck to.

The fields of my youth are largely lost, like the pop songs and hair styles that will never come around again. Tract housing and screwy churches where horses were boarded, gated apartments where thistles and milkweed once grew. I walked the gravel roads and fence lines long before I knew they would be gone. Whatever is always seems like it is going to be forever, what has gone seems an inevitable fossil. Things come and go. Our lives are all renunciation and clinging.

The heat of the day seeps into all the rooms, cats and dogs laid out drowsing on the floor. The heat seeps through my flesh and soaks through my shirt despite all my stillness. I laze in the cooler shadows, watching the finches, jays, and sparrows. Flight and fall, hunger and escape. I take a breath, and then another, the day all languid greens and burning blues. I watch all the familiar changes, another season almost over. Another season almost due.