Ephemeral Dusk

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And I lifted my eyes—

Color trickling from your tree's veins

Massive webs contorting bark—black

Even as it's silver, shifting in the twilight—,

Shadows for its soul, nevermore the same

Reminds me of the mottled back

Of your hand, so old and dry with cracks

Assembling tales twisted as the darkest vine

Scathed with un-rhyming misnomers

Dusty riversides in summertime mock-glory.

Forgetting my plot I scuffle

Tucking away a message, introducing it to

My idle breast pocket, where

It shall sleep a slumber undisturbed…

Until:

As quiet morning approaches—

Its dusky light disturbing dormant trees,

For always in its temporary hibernation, this wood drones

And murmurs in its dream,

As nuisance-critters clamber not,

But so perfectly settle in their chambers

That they might not be in sleep, but death—

They are awakened and brought back

From the precipice of anti-time and sub-thought,

And again into our cyclical world

Of day into noon into afternoon—

During which they stretch their limbs,

Bark creaking for lack of elastic pigments,

And the small creatures come forth from their dwellings

To pluck a berry not yet ripe from its seed

Or claw ways into trunks or create holes in the mosses,

Springing in carpets over boulders and shells,

Making dens in which they might henceforth live—

Yet back into dusk again!

And I lifted my eyes,

Awaiting the moment of transition, watching

For a rosy tincture to unroll across the sky

And fade slowly for a moment to orange

And an instant later to sober gray,

A strange sonata erupting in cacophony,

So that I might record it in my mind,

Nature's Soiled Cadence,

And remember for eternity the fall of her triumphant being.

But no image of imperfection reached my eyes,

Nor did it touch Heaven's essence with a trembling hand;

The darkness swept the whole earth within itself

Spinning it backwards,

Gutting its internal organs for our entire world to see

But not to see, verily, for the black curtain

Pulled across our trees and creatures, our daytime Nature—

So playful and alive while the sun touches its skin—

Until the world was black with gloom and shadows

And to us Nature no longer belonged.

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