rejectomorph | Morning

Five o'clock. After a night of haze, the still-dark sky is at last clearing enough to reveal the lesser stars. Mars hangs low in the west, moving away once again. In the east, Orion is striding up from the deserts where dawn has already rendered him invisible. The silence here fails to hold my thoughts. Inside my head are restless distances of truck-laden highways, milking lights gleaming from dairy barns outside Sacramento, early buses grinding over the dark hills of San Francisco, flatbeds carrying pickers to the melon fields of the valley, rumbling trains laboring over Tehachapi Pass, cranes lifting containers onto ships at San Pedro, pots banging in the kitchens of hundreds of roadside restaurants from Redding to San Diego. I sense the whole of California stirring and heaving itself awake. I don't know why my mind has rejected the prevailing serenity and taken me on this imaginary journey. These images might be harbingers of restless dreams. I shall go out into the soft morning breeze and attempt to dispel them. This might help, too:

Under the Tree

by Denise Levertov

Under an orange-tree --
not one especial singular
orange-tree, but one among

the dark multitude, Recline
there, with stone winejar

and the sense
of another dream
concentration would capture --
but it doesn't matter --

and the sense
of dust on the grass, of infinitesimal
flowers, of
cracks in the earth

and urgent life
passing there, ants and transparent
winged beings in their intensity
traveling from blade to blade,

under modest orange-tree
neither lower nor taller
neither darker-leaved nor aglow
more beneficently

than the dark multitude
glowing in numberless lanes
the orange-farmer counts, but
not you -- recline

and drink wine -- the stone
will keep it cold -- with the sense
of life yet to be lived -- rest, rest,
the grass is growing --

let the oranges
ripen, ripen above you,
you are living too, one
among the dark multitude --