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Hello friends,
It’s summer, and it’s raining a lot. It’s so beautiful when the sun sets on a freshly hydrated world, and I had to write about it. I started this as a regular post, but the more I wrote, the more the words wanted to become a poem. Here’s what emerged.
After a rain, in the twilight of the setting sun in the now clear sky, the world shows me more shades of green than I thought possible. Fresh leaves of jasmine shine like limes next to the deeper emerald of their more mature brethren. Darker still are the stoic live oak offerings, spreading their shade over the yard like an embrace. Spanish moss, so desaturated as to be more grey than green, hangs like streamers at a party, saying celebrate, for the world is more beautiful this way. The magic hour is upon us now. The golden melt of the low sun drips off the trees like so much rain. Jewel-bright Spanish needles and muted ferns sag under the weight of what the clouds left behind. Yet even in their drooping, they thank the cool shower of evening, basking in the reprieve from the summer heat. Green becomes orange-yellow as the sun bends light to its changing whims. It coats the world in gold dust and leaves the mundane sparkling. I’m so tired. The sun is saying goodbye and I’m saying take me with you. But it doesn’t, and I’m left alone in the fading. The dim glow that comes after feels like an exhale, a sigh of resignation and relief. The horizon swallowed the sun and left me as an afterthought. A breeze sweeps through and caresses the puddles left behind with me, rippling like whispers made real. Cicadas invite the darkness down, bridging the gap between day’s blue and night’s black. They sing with the crickets and the nightjars waking. And somehow, the inky dark is as magical as the departed light. Shades of black tumble into each other like crashing waves, like secrets we can’t say when the world is illuminated. But if I let my eyes adjust, I can still see the gold dust shimmering.
Until next time,
Yardena
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WEEKEND POTPOURRI:
Currently on repeat:
There’s an interesting tradition of telling bees about death.
A(nother) poem:
THE END OF LANDSCAPE
By Randall Mann
There's a certain sadness to this body of water adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds, handful of ducks, the water color manmade. A still life. And still life's a cold exercise in looking back, back to Florida, craning my neck like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin. As for the scrub oaks, the hot wind in the leaves was language, Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic— an obsession: I wanted to live in it. (One professor in exile did, covered himself in the stuff as a joke— then spent a week removing mites.) That's enough. The fields of rushes lay filled with water, and I said farewell, my high ship an old, red Volvo DL, gone to another coast, another peninsula, one without sleep or amphibious music. Tonight, in flight from San Francisco— because everything is truer at a remove— I watch the man I love watch the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento, lit city of legislation and flat land. I think of Florida, how flat. I think of forgetting Florida. And then the landscape grows black.