The Day Is Not Dead Yet But Living

The fields, streaked green and tawny, seemed to run forever, getting lost upon the eye, and the fog lay encumbered, straddling the humid plains. An observer could see this spread out from the passing train line and was moored by nature’s anxious capacity, how simple colors massed significance with volume. And this observer reckoned with the startling sun, which capped the white clouds like a flame, a white light flickering and fixed in a dark hall, which opened up like a black hole, offering itself. The onlooker would be forced to carry the poise of an invader, a desolate being, hauling their stricken flesh into the foreground. Towns peppered the horizon and cars appeared tiny, insect-like, and there were no people to be spotted. Each emptied street demanded space, to be indexed in the viewer’s catalog of thoughts, further emboldening the stranded aspect of the land, and the sky grew darker, the clouds caught in a slanting, gray vortex of feeling, an affective storm providing shelter for the distanced onlooker. The rust, the sprawl, the gunbuckets and fishhooks, the assorted objects all came into character, possessive of a throbbing quality if not familiar personhood. And the Earth grew fatter despite the seeming flatness, the dirt heaped itself in mounds, resounding with a torturing awning, yearning to envelop the onlooker’s desirous posture. There was a stream and it was brown, strewn with blushing pebbles, shards of glass laying complicit, beckoning to be restored to neighboring frames. Lost, abandoned, docile, leftover, indistinct, unbecoming. The leaves grew brittle and the roots tangled, becoming eerily present before the fields’ stillness which did little to assuage the perceived void. It was impossible to cull the trees, maples and redwoods, from the forgotten communes, orphans suspended in the deep. Meanwhile, the windmills threatened, swinging white titans planted to the land, claiming prominence. The visitor helpless, looking up at their great yawning stature, how the waving motions grimaced in the pale air, prompting confession. The only value to be measured was time, for place was eternal, and speakers would trade persistent myths, observations, constructing their own mantles of feeling. These stories all crumbled with the sweep of time’s crucible, which kept with the sky’s even fall to the land. Nothing could be upheld forever, yet the flatness remained. The fields, straining, could be brought no lower. Though unmeasurable, consider the lines of sight, purple visions, wrought by the flats! In the distance, one could see the earth stirring, threaded with dipped cloud curls, working to carve out a horizon, lumbering with the day’s embrace of dusk. The viewer would await dawn, the breaking of new light, when the water would become ripe to recall the passage of faces, squinting eyes. The water would shimmer, a body waiting to be filled by another, a motive coupling that would give way to spill, breaking containment.

Photo by Aerial Nomad on Unsplash.