The Sun's Sarcastic Smirk

Cigarette smoke surprises your nostrils, whips your focused, glistening eyes away from the view. "He'll stay healthy," you think as they find the polluter. You look at him in that instant, the impossible beauty of the sunset sky making you too sentimental. Your eyes have left the flawless and found the flawed.

Orange is its most beautiful now. Only when bluesky daylight begins to rest its lashing flail to concede night's cool hand does orange become anything but oppressive. Nature is painted on the sky, "Perfect and unique enough to be the colored map of my soul," you think. Even though you learned from Copernicus, you know that the sun will never again trace the sky like this.

Oh wait, that view is just a memory and the only orange you see now is of the smoldering paper stick protruding with offensive certainty from stained fingers connected to a pair of sunken cheeks. They sink deeper and the embers grow brighter in mocking similarity to the divine display that hasn't left your mind's eye.

Your eyes meet as he takes the first pull. You are annoyed but it is not your consciousness that feels the grate. It is the writer of this very poem, the rememberer of this very memory who will recall that this was the first time when you understood that even lifelong friends are not protected by the strength of your relationship. Nor does the sky just before night throw its divine beauty on you with anything stronger than light.

Your eyes return to the orange scene, which is now just that. It isn't heaven. It isn't beauty so deep that it assures anything more than a lingering stare. When you turn your back, you will find the concrete world again. Beauty that could have justified god will not protect your lungs unused to anything more than backyard ping pong games with five bucks on the line.

The sting of the smoke stays in your nose and reminds you that the sun has set on mortal boyhood friends before and it will do it again.

The sunset's false blanket abandons the smokey air and burning leaf smolders in paper pointing at a liminal horizon, bright on top and dark below in a flat smirk tipping sarcasm towards two watchers, both mortally mortal, locked within the paradox of youth.

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Stone Fog

 

Suddenly we saw a thick fog whose borders were glowing against the sky, blue as the ocean. My mind wandered as I drove towards the mist that had a different quality than any other I had ever been in, because of the before and the after.

The yellow morning light was reflected towards us by hills covered in sun-powered life. We drove to the fog and our imaginations wandered as we stared at the hovering wall, expecting its dark grey color to be solid stone, instead of breathable, suspended moisture.

The seemingly impregnable wall rushed away from our inertia without delay but followed us at wheel-level until we broke the bottom floor of its foundation and the fog became a cloud.

The floor we broke is now a ceiling that cannot keep the rain off of our moving metal blankets.

To Be Green

The smell is not that of the city, smoky, rotten, invasive, but it is rather one of a haplessly crafted forest.  It is a place that has significance because it never quite became the city. It is sacred for this reason, not made to harbor human comfort, but to collect and support life. I see one side of the circle of life towering above me, blocking the sun; the other side I feel beneath my feet, blocking the path from securing my footfalls.  Everything is green and covered in life or fresh death that will keep the circle orbiting.

Moss grows thick with every shade of green, sprouting from the bark of a mighty tree.  Its many fingers capture reflective spheres of newly fallen rain, of the roaring river’s mist, and of my hot breath as I lean close to examine the small world.  I smell the cedar, the natural mulch that catapults my memory back to helping my mother plant her pregrown flowers in our garden, next to a concrete driveway and an exhaust-spewing vehicle.

I return hastily to the present: my body and soul take in the fresh air again, the smell of the wood and the moss rejoins my blood, the detailed scene that I have from an eye pressed to the miniature moss world seems real enough to be a part of me, vivid enough to wallpaper my eyelids whenever I close them… and there I go again, relating this unique world to my own, to that of my viral species.

I would stare at this tree, at this separate world forever, if only it was possible to live off of healthy thoughts. If they are so healthy, why can’t they be sustaining?? With so much life all around me, it seems unfair that I would be left out of the growing. I watch a drop of water explore a downward path on my hand still resting upon the soft green moss blanket, I feel the cold stream of it as it disappears under my sleeve and I realize how easy it can be to forget that there are terrible things in this world. The drop’s communicative tingle started a smile behind closed eyes that now open, searching for a refreshing picture of serenity to reassure a burdened mind. It will soon have to return to inevitable concrete life. For now, let it coexist, let it perceive natural beauty that is unaware of itself; it would be a travesty for it to go unappreciated. This, then, will be my role. For the forest I will perceive the glory of life and in doing so, I will be as active in its existence as the symbiotic moss climbing its parent tree to be closer to the sunlight. 

My eyes close again, satisfied with my new role, even accepting of a return to concrete; because the more time I spend in city traffic or walking cracked sidewalks or breathing exhaust, the more I will appreciate what first defined the color green. The memory is real enough to persist, even if I never return to this place again.