Sweeping

The birds are like pupils, open and black in between barren branch lids.

 

A Brighter Midnight

Through the fog, standing in front of opacity, lights blink, bob, dissappear and wink again a little further to the right. My headlights are poking fun at me, bouncing off puddles and granite gravestones.

Red Light

Springtime bunnies scatter like marbles across the roads. Driving late, my karma felled, I kill with my quiet black automobile. It is impossible to process the loss of one small life when seven scatter before you. The sunset pinked the trim of the house. Hours later, the moon has the unflickering blue of a static-screened television, lighting the yard like a giant late night living room.

California Hills

My body has slept through february, and though march is hours brighter, it is still slow to wake. I cannot run the negligible mile to the ocean. This morning I forced myself there, through the fog, then a slow, pointed drizzle, and finally into a blinding southwest rain. The sound of March precipitation, half-hard and plummeting amplifies the waves and kills any other sound. I hold my fingers in a cage over my eyes to see the high rolling tide as it swept recklessly against clay cliffs.

Sprinting, panting, and sprinting my way home, raindrops snap against the ground and puddles burst into rolling windswept poppy fields. At the door my thighs are shiny with rain and my jacket, soaked, hangs with the despair of a towel pulled from a bathtub.

Easy June

This island is warmer now than it was in May. I expect the crocuses to peer out at any moment, disoriented and endangered in their sleepy state.

Yesterday at 7 am a chorus of hounds began their crescendo as I walked past. The houses on the dirt back street are, unlike much of the rest of the island, awake in the morning. The windows are warmly lit in the evening by yellowing floodlights. So many homes sit empty, staring flat and bored by the incredible weather.

Déjà vu

Last night the stars were completely hidden. Great black bandages of clouds spread across the sky, a poultice against the icy clarity of January's midnight. The moon peered through, blankly, weakly illuminating brittle grasses and frosted sand.

This morning the sun sat on the other side of the horizon, a mirror of our small sattelite, and 8 hours late. It too, seemed dazed and lethargic, visible through the low fog but unable to penetrate. At 7 am, a full four fingers above the horizon, it had yet to scare a single shadow into existance.

Boxing Day

The grey lady is suiting up for New Year's. The ribbons of fog that were strewn across Wauwinet Road early Sunday morning have woven themselves into a full-on blanket. The sky appears clear overhead but the day is hazy and the crispness of a late fall has left. The trees are at their most barren - it is just moments after the last leaf has dropped but months from when the first springtime chartreuse will peer from its home in the branch of a brave tree.

The ocean is thick and the waves hard against the south shore. Everything has taken on a blueish tinge. Even the low brush at the moors, usually a reliable red, has turned to maroons, mauves and purples. The dead grasses at Sanford Farm stand out, a bright ochre, the only burning color I have seen all week.