After the Rain

Perhaps from the trees’ black shadows, small birds burst into color, their bright feathers flaring like the sun itself.  As their warmth drives away the wetness, poppies in bloom cast a tangerine glow over green water. Large bands of clouds dissipate to reveal a blue sky mingled with a magic of tint and pigment, forming an arc of translucent hue - vast, brilliant, evanescent, and fanciful.

Maybe to look at bright green leaves against the black trunk of a wet tree is similar to asking a question. I wonder, how to grieve for the blackened part? Sunshine spreading like a golden fever into my veins moves across my eyes as shadows abandon the objects that once projected them. Yet in my heart I am pinched by something sharp as the dark, as the receding root of winter chills the air around me. I walk out into the morning surrounded by colors so bright and restless I can’t bear to look at them for long.

Someone's Memory

Perhaps I once entered someone’s memory. The place was planted with a forest of large shade trees and loud voices. On one of the trees hung a painting of a cat, a cat sleeping on a fence, a cat who was famous to the birds. The cat woke up to stretch as daylight ended. I called out to the cat, to the trees, to the birds, to the loud voices; I called out to the shadow of the sky’s wide and immense stare, to the empty, black, interstellar nothing, to the dark gleams appearing on the backs of leaves, but not even a breath of wind answered me.

Maybe as the night progressed I called out to the moon who appeared to be so close that it would be possible to travel there to visit her. I called out in a silence only the moon could understand, but the moon was looking elsewhere. My mind moved on to the next memory, a story that formed a treeless forest where all possibility of upward escape was cut off.  I met you there once in this field of wildflowers and running streams, but who is going to tell me how to find my way to you again in this land I am speaking of? Who will dare to plant a single tree in this field where eye and spirit remain divided in layers of stopped voices and inverted shadows?

A More Beautiful Question

Perhaps we should consider what’s worth doing even at the risk of failure. Then quietly ask ourselves, what are the odds that we’re wrong? And wonder, why did we love doing this so much as a child? And how might we better pry off that lid and stir the paint? Better yet, what if we could use one paintbrush to replace another? And being that we all live in the world our questions help create, how do we get more people in the door, and really make the numbers add up?

Maybe, in the face of uncertainty, why not ask, why are we climbing this mountain in the first place? And what are we leaving behind, deep inside and down below? And what if we succeed? Who will miss us? And finally, what if we could ask this question in a way that it has never been asked before?