green cathedral

The winds give in to the cool shadows, the sky still blazes blue, the season so green and reaching. The tangled grasses and the bone strewn yard, children passing in masks on bicycles, the dogs lying down by the drive. The sun is ducking out behind the house, a blaze of glory upon the fields and crown of the silent elementary school while the light takes sides between earth and firmament. The direction of the abducted smoke, the glide of the drive by, and the separation by wings all take their measures. I am left with the attended embers and the intersections of the reports. I am left to the wrong heavens and the slipping of the stars.

The sun goes slow, touching the tall cypress and the lonely palms, swaying their soft so longs with the wind. The chill strolls through bloom and skin, the great balance always adjusting to local conditions. The asphalt shedding some radiation that the fickle concrete ignored, an explosion of new leaf more translations of the reckless abundance of sunlight. A crow flies low above the treetops, cutting northwest over the green and vacant school field. Yet another story over my head, another telling behind my back. The wheel turns on without a care.

From the floodplains of my childhood to these days of drought and pavement, from the days of dreams to the lay of the land, the map is never the same twice. I wander the depths of this apostasy, the debt and the drear instead of the destiny. The mountains had called, then the forest had found me, then I was taken by the green cathedral beside the sea. It told me a secret that was only me, met in these passages between mountains, imbued in a fever before a fire beneath clear cold stars. A call caught in the atmosphere, that shade of twilight almost the sifted scatter of the ancient temples of sequoia and spruce, a sharpness of salt when the morning’s gulls bring along a breath of sea beneath their wings. The night presumes and my skin still dreams my name.