Shards

I gaze out the window straining to capture the scene in sketches. Each sentence becomes a contour, each phrase a dark smudge of charcoal against the page. Colored pencils highlight the flame of dawn reflected beneath the clouds, or the golden aura radiating from the grass.

Do those short, sharp stokes capture the landscape before me, or do I need to spend more time shading with a flat blade of words?

Some days practice brings a steadier hand hour by hour. Today, words clog my thinking, dripping with an incessant tick, tick, tick rather than opening my mind to breathe.

As I struggle to describe a flower that makes my eyes ache, a veil of clouds thickens like the strands of mold binding the dead leaves in the garden, fading the sky a uniform white tinged with the dingy gray of old sheets drawn across its window like cheap curtains. Vivid colors dull like the ungroomed fur of an aging cat drooping across old bones.

A southern wind tinged with moisture augurs the transition from dry to humid, from cool to jungle hot. The breeze murmurs as it sways a pine, rubbing its trunk across guy wires like a rosined bow set to the untuned strings of a creaky standup bass. It becomes difficult to distinguish between distant, imaginary voices and the sounds the wind creates.

The morning slips by in slow agitation, my heart pounding against the coming change. Finally, my concentration shatters. Fragments of thoughts tumble one against the other, pulled by the same inescapable force. Each catches my attention for instant as it flashes a reflection before shading itself from the light as it spirals downward.

Routine transforms into a quest to the clear the glass daggers from my mind. A translucent film of blood stains each reflection as I grasp at it. My fingers slip and instinctively clutch tighter until the pain slices deeper and they reluctantly release the sliver which shatters further as I let it go.

Thoughts come in flashes between the ringing blows of a migraine driven through my right eye like a ten-penny nail. The shards will lay where they rest until I sweep them aside in a day or two, brooding at the lack of fractured faces staring back at me, the distorted semblance of an audience responding to my pain.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III