THE TREE SAW WINTER STORMS LIKE COLD FIRES

Circling around the bend and there is a bird still, stationary, waiting in the distant tree. The hawks in the distance that fly in the morning away, stirred, are absent. The coyote, unless secretly watching, is also not present. The other things that have gone away are the spring blooms. There must have been thousands of white flowers in the field along with hundreds of yellow buttercups. Also strange purple plants and feral shrubs that looked tropical, that had affixed to their branches red bulb-like and puffy growths that looked like plush carpets waiting in the sun. It’s an anti-climactic summer out there, - all these things growing and then disappearing before August really rolls. But there is the bird, alone. I didn’t know what to think, and maybe that is the point. He or she is simply present, having alighted on the old tree, the tree now skeletal, and a giant odd creature that could come to life at night. And what is the night like there. I could ask the bird, “Bird, what it is like when I leave? What is the pace and tempo of the wind? Who and what is here? Can you relate it to me?” But he would surely ignore me. A butterfly, white, does come past. Two things that fly sure, but how different they are. I keep walking. I have no beef with the bird, and on the contrary, admire its serenity, am vaguely envious of its view. It’s dropped a few degrees, and a slight breeze comes through. He suddenly departs, and the tree is vacant. It was better with the bird, but the bird can’t be sentimental about such things. He has his way, and the tree has hers. She waits for another. She has seen perhaps more than the bird, has most definitely lived longer. She probably laughs at all this and says, “If you think that bird is something, you are caught in romantic poetry, fitful and orthodox musings, - nothing new, - for I, the tree, am the real one you should be talking about. I saw not only that birds parents come and go, - but generations before that. I have seen storms that would have you shutter and shake. The winter winds harsh, like a cold fire that blows through the county and across all lines and designations. It makes the one-lane highway in the distance invisible. And rains- you’ve not known what rain is, and for that matter neither does that bird! Where do I have to go, I ask you sir, - when it rains pellets, when it rails ten million marbles of hailstone, when it rains for days and nights together? Yes,- I am only saying, I am only telling you a truth…but he and others can rest here, do stop here,- and that is the way of things and its okay…” And so I continue, and the horizon line seems to stretch out in one direction and begin somehow to melt into the earth. We are all, however different, losing light, so have to make our ways in the manner we know. 

-------------------------------------------------