PETAL AND OTHER

Once out from the busy infrastructure and near the fields the sky seems to open it and it

becomes infinite yet hooked to the ground somehow. The fields on Highway 48 or along it rather, have barns old and new, plus dwellings that are of every sort and variety. Some are made from simple bricks, usually red or brown, and others are put together with old stones. The latter ones look like something from the days before the invention of concrete forms. In the fronts are sometimes potted flowers or vines on trellises, but not always. Sometimes an old car sits on blocks. By the side of the roads are sometimes dead animals. Usually racoons and the light beige hue are because through death the blood is eventually drained and dries and/or evaporates. There is always some interesting thing for the eye and soul along that way- if it is not a series of mature and post-card like trees, then it may be some white horses next to a red barn. If those don’t present themselves or do and don’t suffice, there will be out of nowhere a million yellow flowers in a deep green acreage or a feral cat jumping somewhere near a wooden fence flaxen from the sun but still standing, still standing, still standing.

Over a bridge the way is made, and underneath the still water with water
spiders, birds, bass, catfish, mayflies, so forth. Little boats bob by the side and larger vessels can sometimes be seen also. The shore wall is white and at other sections dark grey. Sometimes near there are advertisements, moreso in the summer than spring- for wares, furniture, sales, fruits. The sun goes up, and the sun crosses the sky, and then what? Yes, the sun goes down. Still people talk about the strange summer of yester-year, - the one that saw flash storms and even something like small tornadoes. There is a parachute coming down from a plane and the cars go and go and go along the highways and back roads and lanes. 

A little in the distance is a skeletal barn. Its soul has gone, but its bones remain. An

interesting site. Something that should collapse but does not. Is it really dead? Or is stuck in a bardo, a purgatory? Probably neither. Its just wood and some concrete maybe near the bottom. What stories it could tell,- tales of the winter, poems of the spring, prose of the summer, and codified or oral requiems for practically all the flora and fauna in the late autumnal afternoons. It has seen squirrel and skunk, racoon and raucous bird, the growth and then dislocating of myriad widlflowers in the still air and then moving winds...

Over a ways, the tracks, and the CN does not go as much on the weekends, but one does

come through barreling along about an hour before the beginning of dusk. The red and black car will come first followed by the others. Some of them are ‘tagged,’ spray painted, and the words, thick and colorful, belong to the esoteric artistic set that does such things, - from another way, means, nomenclature, pitch, idiom, birth and life and death.

All through that two Orioles jump around in the branches of a tree with white and pink buds and flowers. They show the darkest of yellow bellies and seem content. Their actions make some of the petals disjoin and descend to the ground. The path through the air is a dream, a life in itself. The pieces of flowers begin to touch other branches, other flowers, and then find their way to the open air. Round lightly they twirl. There is a single one now. It is fallen and falling. Yet, it keeps a grace. A silent grace. The train is gone now and along with it the rumbling sound. There is only the petal wafting downwards in the air like an overgrown flake of snow. People are talking, electrical lines are buzzing, and there are new insects in the wild bushes over the way. The sun is beginning to set. It will become a round red neon beet that slips into a secreted pocket beyond the water, beyond the horizon, beyond everything known. 

                                         But first the petal has to land, gently, in the new

summer grass deeply green and thickly textured. And it hasn’t yet. It is mid-air, and if looked at, seems soft and kind. It sits in the air, in the world, in the pre-dusk place, frozen in time but living in the timeless.

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