Pale Morning

[rejectomorph]

I didn't get to see Orion this morning after all. Clouds rolled up before midnight and concealed the stars. Now and then a few of them briefly glow hazily, but most of the sky remains dark. There is a heaviness to the air, and even most of the crickets have fallen silent. Were it not for the humming of the window fans, the night would be very quiet. Sunday morning will gray into being and reveal a stilled town with little traffic, deserted sidewalks, and empty parking lots.

Perhaps the sun will send the clouds packing before the churches fill with congregations unsummoned by any bells. This is a scattered place, and no sound can gather it together, no amount of light bring it into focus. It seems more coherent by night, when it can be pictured as a community of sleep, inhaling and exhaling with slow regularity, its disparate citizens conjoined by a universal need. By day, even leisure pulls the town apart.

But I am always apart from the town, even by night. My connection is to the trees and soil, the clouds and stars, the rooted grasses and the etched lines of distant mountains. All that is here built is strange to me, and the inhabitants are like figures in dreams, coming and going for no apparent reason. I sometimes wonder if, were I to return to Los Angeles, I would think that I had in fact dreamed this place. Maybe I will wake one day and find that I have.



Sunday Verse

Hamlen Brook

by Richard Wilbur

    At the alder-darkened brink
  Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
    And see, before I can drink,

    A startled inchling trout
  Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
    He swerves now, darting out

    To where, in a flicked slew
  Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
    And butts then out of view

    Beneath a sliding glass
  Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
    In which deep cloudlets pass

    And a white precipice
  Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
    How shall I drink all this?

    Joy's trick is to supply
  Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
    Nothing can satisfy.