attendant

The gray tide of sky held a warm wind to the whet of the world, the thick spill of heaven pushed into the earth until it trails scintillating sparks and myriad blooms. With the bitter on my breath, the black coffee’s warm regards spill from my tainted tongue. I sit, spewing plumes of smoke and respirated air, watching the leaves slow shudder as if in deep pleasure, imagining the bride of the sky. 

Something moving through the mantle. Something dragging along the atmosphere. Crows abandoning their riotous assemblies, their solemn rise sleek and righteous against the stirring sky. The clouds avoid any confrontation, wandering off as clouds will do. I maul a cigar into submission leaving a smoldering, chawed up husk of damp leaf and smoldering embers fuming in the ashtray. A long list of usual suspects committed to the busywork of changing states. The thoughts all assemble as coffee runs down my beard. I lean into the deepened breath.

Suddenly the sun is the headliner, brilliant blue sky above the shivering green, stirring the incandescence. A crow calls, three times then alights the passing gust, eloquence to the shimmering ink black feather. There is an ache, there is a yearning. There is a burning down blazing away and the weight of loss met, and all the loss to come. The moving on you whether you choose to move, the deep heat and the flagrant injustice crossing currents as the flame abides. There is the trembling before the transformation, the weight of a great silence rolled aside. An old man smoking on the edge of a storm.