Sunday, April 04, 2010

BEGUILED BY NIGHT

This is part of a larger video about the pond, but it's here because I've always been beguiled by night


Fascinated by sunrise, I sit my seat in the garden shed well before false dawn creeps across the land where I live. As Earth rotates Priest and I inexorably east, the materiality of the atmosphere’s rare air high enough to see over the now silhouetted shadows catches glimpses of the radiant energy source and transmits them down to us as a gradual approach to full daylight.

Well after it is bright enough for me to write these words, Sol himself appears in piercing shafts of light, unabsorbed by the hungry leaves that recently grace the filigree of winter’s black branches with clothing of spring foliage, to strike our eyes with shocking directness despite the gentle announcement of its coming. These rays of pure white energy from that fiery orange ball are parsed into the daily spectacle of their sparkling spectrum as they strike the shiny slime trails of slugs’ overnight devouring the remnant meal of chicken feed and the spherical Pink Floyd prisms of dewdrops condensed upon the leaves of the garden vegetables.

Bemused by noon hour when shadows are their shortest, my flute and I respond to the spontaneous symphony of nature’s voices in a harmony unrehearsed, though variations of nature's theme are repeated every day. In a response learned in early chickhood, my fowl family returns from scattered scratch, scratch, peck, pecking for the resurging burgeon of insect life to be found over their eight acre hunting grounds, to enjoy the tattered tortilla’s I strew for their midday snack and a headcount by the mother hen I've become.

Intrigued by dusk, my seat in the shed transports me into the turbulence formed by the heated air of the day being cooled and driven upward by the cooler darkness of earth’s shadow overtaking us at the insensible pace of a thousand miles an hour as the light wanes as it had waxed in the morning. As if by precision meters, the girls return at a time varying with the length of day to roost for darkness’ duration.

Beguiled by night, my imagination is unleashed to create realities of invisibility to posit materiality behind the reflections of man’s puny lights off of beings found during the day by their shadows. Toads gather in the pond for bufo orgy time, filling our ears with roars belying their tiny size as they procreate polliwogs in a plethora of ova contained in ribbons wrapped around the stems of papyrus recovering from recent frostbite depletion them selves. The scent of a skunk, approaching with a curiosity equally beguiled by night, grows from my nostalgic fondness for its freshness to an odor threatening my gag reflex and fades again as she passes on. Priest is sensed more than seen as his paler shade of dark brushes my shins and hops into my lap for the umpteenth mutual appreciation moment of the day.

9 comments:

Unspoken said...

That second paragraph... Very nice. Enjoyed the whole piece, but the second paragraph had me especially looking forward to what you would write next. Liked it!

Brian Miller said...

some fabulous descriptors ...buffalo orgy and pink floyd dewdrops...beguiled i am...

Yodood said...

Amy, I hadn't even my first edit and here you are. By your post 57 minutes early, it's obvious we have similar writing non-schedules. Thanks for the generous recognition of my attempt to emulate the flow of nature in my writing.

Brian, that's Buffo as in buffo=toad. Buffalo, Hah, didn't suspect I'd be taken so humorously!

Yodood said...

Brian, your mistake was due to my misspelling. It should have been "…bufo orgy time", not that bluffalo orgy wouldn't be funny.

Anonymous said...

Fascinating- you caught nature by the tail, here, and turned her loose with facepaint.

You captured the essence of sunrise with the spectrum of wildland creatures and their voices.

PattiKen said...

Maybe it's the flute music, which sounds so Native American, but your words feel like a Navajo hymn. Their "religious" beliefs, based on respect for Nature, has always spoken to me. Your piece here does the same, recounting night into day into night. It's the natural flow of things.

JeffScape said...

I'm with She Writes. The second paragraph is excellent (though I did have to look up "filigree"), but the final one is even better.

You, sir, are a natural romantic. Or a romanced naturalist. I suspect both.

Tom said...

mmm, i wish my thoughts moved as yours when i summer in my garden. but i guess i can't stop picking weeds long enough to wax poetic. an entire tome of these ponderful nature morsels would satisfy; and lemonade.

Krys said...

Really great work. I'm with PattiKen, it has the feel of a psalm of sorts.

And I didn't have to look up "filigree," I have some tattooed. :)