DUSK

It’s a vast place. By almost anyone's standards I would think. We headed out there and it was still the earliest hint of dusk occurring, but only like a secret, like a small flower practically unnoticed and seen at the far  edge of a sight line. You could hear the birds, as if they were getting ready for something, a small migration perhaps. Sometimes the large cargo trains come past with designations like TRITON, UNION PACIFIC, CN, MAERSK and other, - but not today. Maybe they don’t travel on Sunday. There are a lot of properties around there and some of them are farms with horses on the grounds. Old fences brown, and only sometimes a bright or faded white, seem to keep them well. In the rain, in the cold, in certain seasons, I can see that they are adorned with coats. There is probably a special name for them, but I shall call them horse coats. A silo or roof catches some light from the sun. Old mailboxes. Long driveways. I think in ten years, fifteen or twenty at the most, - the new-new urban sprawl will overtake all of it. I wonder who will remember the old farmers, the old horse people. Someone will say that the horses had coats, and someone else will say no, that that is rubbish, a story, - that horses don’t wear coats. There is a black horse up the way, - and its natural coat shines from the summer sun like someone has crushed diamonds, hidden them inside the hairs of the animal, and now they give off a wonderful secret, - glimmer, shine. The fields are wild but succinct. Wild for the grasses and feral shrubs, the ants, insects, bees, and myriad wild flowers. They also see foxes cross, deer, coyotes, porcupines, skunks, and of course racoons. Right now, wild raspberries and a few black berries or hybrids grow among the sides of paths. Vines twist and turn around other vines, - intelligent, confident, knowing but not the way we know. Most of us anyhow. Succinct and logical because the sixty four hectares are divided into three parts. The first part is flat and is a square. The second part a bit more windy and hilly, but about the same size. The third part goes downhill and boasts hundred of still-new evergreens. In the winter it looks like a postcard. Even if you touch it, it can absorb your footprints and your friends and you’re frolicking and still remain intact- pristine. It’s too big to be that bothered by you. I wonder what Conrad would think of that. I wonder if Conrad said much about the snow. And still the trains come, to the left, - a bit far off past the frozen bog. Mosquitoes and black flies of course nothing but a dream then. Reports of gun fire from a range. That happens to the right as you walk in. People worry,- but I think it’s a wee bit farther if not a lot farther off that souls think. The best is in the late autumnal afternoon-red green yellow hued world- when the sky, pregnant with rain, turns colors and mood. The air, electrical, makes the dogs to jump and run extra energetically. Large drops of water begin. Then the storms and how it clears anyone out if anyone is there. We saw some trees that had so much character, - vines, possibly poison ivy, - growing bout them. Red berries beside their trunks, and behind a flaxen field of wheat juxtaposed by curt and smart green summits on either side. I thought I saw a woodpecker and know I did see a black bird. There is another feathered friend, - but he hides, - and has creepy and extra long wings, - he is almost like a creature from a story, song, or film. Once he came out from a bird house full of a prescience I could not explain and flew across fields gracefully, calmly, and I shall never know if or where or how he alighted. Near bouts the end we stood and waited, and there was nothing but there was everything. The dusk dimmer switch then turning more. For some reason I thought of the ways of there and the artifacts along the ways. They included but were by no means limited to the old logs, the rotting birch like forgotten parchment paper, the moss and the moss covered trees receiving twilight, mid day, late afternoon, and evening. The sounds of the wind if that can be an artifact too, - and how it is surely the cousin to the ocean for they appear alike. The sonic boom of thunder and you should be scared but are excited instead as something in the guts and blood, the marrow and brain feels validated. Is it a dream or is it real? Hmm…that is interesting….the question mark, tried for fun- a Hail Mary pass to the keyboard, .worked! What else? The trees that look tropical and have red things like cones growing in the middle of them. Dogs in the distance, someone else’s dogs, - barking. God, - that cat that is always in heat-and I mean to say like every day. Is it the same cat? Is it feral? Is semi feral. The crass engines of airplanes, - but then- hey- they are accepted and can become mildly interesting. Sometimes a helicopter. Has something happened or are they training? Rolls and rolls of wild verdant grasses and the wind carries them over upon themselves like a pictured song. The idea that there might be a new-age or old age vortex along a certain area by some old growth trees. The marshy area down by the tracks- the hundreds, no must be thousands of discovered yellow buttercup flowers- untouched by human or animal- just waiting there, impossibly beautiful and quiet and numerous. Something running in the corner of the eye. An old tree, fallen, broken by the storm, and there is really nobody it seems in that low and out of the way area to clear it, to cut it, to move it. A world without an arborist,- everything falling where it may, doing what it may,- crumbling and then degenerating into earth, reincarnating in a scientific and unsentimental fashion. The air,- empty of the heavy vexatious vibrations of industry and business, of crowds with their thoughts slovenly, craven, acrimonious, distasteful, untactful, judgemental, provincial, and above all,- small small small and oozing with mediocrity. Frogs, toads, but I never saw a praying mantis. The good garter snakes,- the owl- now he or she is like in a movie- an omen, a totem, wildly spooky for some reason but still auspicious,- guarding the highway- day and night and day and night and day once more. Then, vroom, he leaps from the sign or the tree and goes off to the air--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------there is nothing like him and he can fly, by my bet, by my eye, by my sense, as well as Mr. Hawk or Mr. Crow or any of them. One of the fastest and most agile ice skaters I ever say was at Centre Ice circa 1990 and he was obese. So, - there you go- the owl- flying like a king. He knows about the dusk, this thing that has by then by turned on, and in its turning is taking away the flower, the vine, even the summit. It darkens it. The dusk is something that can grow exponentially, like a weed, like the rhyme of a song or dance. It is there then, and it has blossomed. The red raspberry meshes with the distant loam. Yellow fields turn light purple before hunter green. Then….its dark blue followed by black. The night is an equalizer and it is almost borne.

But that is another time and circumstance altogether. 

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