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

Journeys over Water

We travel from our troubles toward a place of greater safety, a sanctuary if only for a day. Three times we cross the water at midday, three times we return at twilight. Six passages that echo like a spell of initiation gaining power as its mantra is repeated. Six shining swords of motion we now carry that resonate with magic each time we climb the stone hill arching above the bay.

A sparkling road across a deep blue field intersects our path, leading directly toward the sun. Before us, clouds trailing mist lighten the azure of the sky to aqua in their wake, though the illusion of their rain is dispelled long before the ground. Below, a spider web of lines anchors the fishing pier to the water.

Rafts of terns drift idly across the bay. Cormorants are stacked in a precise pecking order on the crossbars of a ranging tower. Open formations of pelicans glide just above the wave tops, their wingtips brushing the water, leaving a trail of ripples as if from a line of isolated showers. Ospreys sit sentinel atop the light poles that line the causeway like columns crowned with slowly blinking gargoyles whose heads swivel to eye us as we pass.

On the far shore, gray-bearded oaks witness our approach over an alien landscape their children will never visit while crows gossip across the sky, rumoring our arrival.

With our departure, distant clouds focus the setting sun into an orange-white blaze as they transit the horizon like distant mariners manning crystal ships that sail above the sea. Inland, a pillar of glass and steel captures the sun and is transformed into a burning beacon of divine providence or an omen of its impending wrath. The finger of flame fades as we slowly descend toward home, leaving us unscathed.

The sun now set, the turquoise mirror of the water reflects the pinks and lavender-grays of the approaching evening that marks an end to our adventures. Returning to familiar ground, we prepare to move the cycle forward into a better year ahead, the difficulty of the journey now behind us.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Reflections

Driving home on Sunday evening, I saw a cloud sheet off toward the west and wondered how to capture its unique beauty in words. That is the trick to writing, putting a sight or experience into words in a way a stranger can say, I've seen or felt that. Or it made me see or feel something.

In this case, there were qualities that defied convenient description. First, there was the texture of the clouds, The tops rose like thunderheads, but the bottoms were almost melded together. Neither flat and featureless, nor mackereled or scaled as you sometimes see. More like brownie batter poured into a pan right before you pop it into the oven, mostly smooth but with lumps and ridges and rolls.

You probably wonder what is so important about the texture to the cloud bottoms. First, let me describe the tops. As I said, they were towering, backdropped one against the other. They blocked the sun, but only just, so their edges were the blinding white of Florida's summer sun. That transitioned to a silver above then to heavy, rain-laden gray below. Behind them the pastels of sunset were just beginning to color the horizon.

All pretty hum-drum so far. You could go out on a thousand evenings after a thousand Florida summer days, look to the west and see some variant of exactly what I've described. The difference came underneath. What made it stand out, what haunted me into trying to capture it in words for two days, was the color.

I'll start by saying a friend of mine used to be fascinated with lead crystals, the faceted, sometimes elongated orbs you still see. Growing up, he hung them in his window so they would refract the light into hundreds of rainbows that would splash across his bedspread. Most people have seen similar rainbows dancing across a surface in their home, either purposefully as were his, or accidentally from a drinking glass or beveled edge of a window, any glass that catches the light. When most people visualize a rainbow, they see pure colors against the blue of the sky or against some neutral color hanging in the space of their mind's eye.

My friend was a visionary. His bedspread was deep black and satin, engineered to reflect the light as well as provide a unique backdrop for the colors he wished to collect. Black changes a rainbow. You can still pick out each individual stripe that bleeds one into the other, but the colors are deepened, almost tainted. Ruby darkens to wine, orange to rust, yellow to the deepest gold. Having been exposed to that in my impressionable youth prepared me to attempt to describe what I saw.

The bottoms of the clouds were cast in shadow, the silver gray above darkening to a looming charcoal. Splashed across this as if from one broad stroke of a artist's brush was a color it took me several moments to identify. At first I wanted to say it tainted the clouds to a slate green. No perhaps an orange, or was I picking that up from the hints on the horizon. My mind flashed back and forth between the two colors until it finally settled midway between onto gold, as though a mirror were reflecting the sunlight up to the underside of the clouds. In a way, that was exactly what I was seeing. Driving west, we were approaching Boca Ciega Bay, with the intercoastal and the Gulf of Mexico beyond. Being nearly six in the evening, the sun was just low enough to be behind the clouds, lining them a brilliant white and still reflect off the bay to light the underside a muddy gold.

I can sense your impatience. You can see the physics of what I've described but still don't have the payoff. You have pieces of a description from the narrative, but nothing that resonates within your mind, nothing that will anchor the scene into your memory as it did in mine. Let me see what I can nip and tuck and stitch together.

---------------------

The western clouds were poured against unseen glass, its surface ancient, rippled and flawed. Jostling against one another, they blockade the sun and crowd the sky for room. Above, they rise as airy pastries, incandescent edges cooling to silver centers as argent rays sunburst around them at increasingly slanted angles. Below, they fade to ash and char, shadowing an unseemly secret behind a veil of gray. Beyond, the match has been set to the evening furnace that will blaze when the descending sun lights the fuel littering the horizon.

An extended grove of stately oaks ring the mirror of the bay, concealing the burnished bronze of a proud and ancient lighthouse since tumbled into the sea. The fallen hand of a broken and sleeping colossus focuses its tarnished light beneath the clouds as if opening a leaden coffer lined with gold and illuminating the covenant of rain concealed within.

---------------

Best I can do on a nervous morning, reflecting on the process as well as the memory as I wait for the next appointment.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III