Bright red cardinals engage gray and white mockingbirds in a territorial war, each flicking from tree to wire, singing out their borders with madrigals of battle. A colony of jays erupts in a riot of shrieking blue until a vestal white egret stalks innocently from their lair. Ospreys haunt an aerial highway concealed below a canopy of adjacent trees and homes as they hunt the margins between more bountiful lakes. A dusky heron stands in water as still as the reeds concealing him while fingerling fish dart between his legs unaware of the danger until his yellow bill flashes like lightning from a clear, blue sky. An opalescent halo shines through brush-stroke clouds, masking yet defining the sun reflected on the water like a sheet of hammered gold, lighting the hazy horizon like a candle in the fog. As the neon mist disperses, the sun sets a bush ablaze in the spaces between its leaves, like an omen or promise. Or a voice.
The full moon precedes the solstice by two full nights, a waning prophecy diffusing the shadows with its soft, continuous light.
A night breeze climbs a spider strand in a shaft of reflected light, like a violin being tuned to the perfect pitch of the starry sky. A tandem of creeping meteors tracks across the darkness, watchfires from distant outposts, flickering reminders that our farthest colonies remain intact.
A pair of crows disrupts the moonlight, the precursors to a murder, large, indigo and iridescent. One splashes in the stone basin while her mate picks at the lavender flowers of the myrtle to which it's chained. Thought and Memory, All Father's ever present eyes and ears, taunting me, laughing at my troubles. I echo their laughter back at them, the mingled sound of joy combating the sorrows of this life.© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III
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