Horizons

Hand in hand on the low, green point, we watch another day, another season, another year pass beyond the water to the west. As we await rebirth, we contemplate the skyline, the transition and the night. Where were we a year ago? Where will we be tomorrow? A tangled web of clouds lies clotted high in the fading light, a reflection of our unspoken thoughts.

Above the lake, a ribbon of crows swirls and flutters from horizon to horizon, mocking the darkness they fly before. A few double back into eddies, vortices of a dozen birds, before rejoining the stream meandering north and west as if defying the gravity of the flat, featureless plain below. Harbingers or prophecies, they will return at daybreak, leaving other birds to divine the night.

Mountains of fog loom against the horizon like a distant, shadowed ridgeline, gray silhouettes dividing a world of darkness from light.

Sunlight glints off a cloud edge like the thin blade of a bronze knife then sets the clouds smoldering like a wildfire sparked on the horizon. Molten gold pours through a skin of clouds cracked and fissured like crazed porcelain revealing the base, white earth beneath.

Behind the bank of broken fog a golden landscape lies half concealed. Soft, lighted hills and twinkling marshes bracket a glowing river winding toward a shining city in the distance with jeweled spires surrounding a central dome. A vision too bright to gaze upon for long, the vision of an afterlife. An instant of crystalline clarity before the vision fades in the afterglow, graying first to charcoal then to black. The afterimage is burned into our minds, returning like the nightingale whose songs will haunt our dreams.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III