From The World.

Every half hour the train runs behind the arborvitaes with a few blasts of its horn. Their boughs shake and for a moment the pool light glimmering  in the branches bounces up and down. Even the hydrangeas nod their sorbet embroidery.

The telephone pole above the tracks is a weathered gray wooden pole. The train rushes by and suddenly the coaxial cables hop up and down as if a small tightrope walker strides atop. Sucking up rainwater, the roots of the bushes vibrate from the pulse that follows down the tracks.

The shadows of the trees lay across the bottom of the pool. Above ripples pushed out of the jets mix upon the first blue inch of water.  With ripples the water resembles a piece of metal hammered on.

Lonely a white airplane moves through the sky. Highmoving and silent, a coat of the sun’s paint reflects off its wings, and it looks like a fish drifting across the open sea.

As the sound of the whistle dives into the next town the sun continues to make its way down the slope of evening; and the shadows slowly begin to elongate on the blocks of cement and poolchairs. Evening cools, but a yellow humid mist still hangs in the air. Like a spell the red and orange trees shine white light in the crescents of their leaves. And silent breezes, passing through the filter of branches, rustle then spill over the poolside.

Once more beneath the paling beside the tracks hostas bloom. They lift the pale purple knobs of their spindle-stalks up above the rusted lips of pine needles and the daggers of a bluegreen yucca bush. The tunnel of air awaits another train. Evening is full of translucent waxcaps, and the trees wears spots of lichen. Drop from a sunshower.

The sky awash with blue and white, the ocean’s waves flow and lilt.

Liquid metal sunlight flows up the bend. Lilting, wobbling, curling, the wave nears shore and breaks down, poisoning the sand blue. Then new waves break: an imbrication of liquid tiles flowing.

The sun’s rays, teeth of a crocodile, cross the sky.

The final chapter in the Anthony Lemon trilogy.

The Trials of Anthony Lemon Part III: Lost at Sea

Summer continues to roll by; each night I count fewer and fewer fireflies. When I was young I received a gift from my parents — a jar with a dark green lid and holes — from which fireflies lit the dark of my room like the stars painted on the walls.

Two weeks ago while babysitting the house, with the last periwinkle decaying in the sky, I went out with a glass jar and sealing wrap to try my luck. I dropped one, two, three of the leaf-scented flies into my trap, then sealed and knifed holes through the film and watched. To my panic they did not light.

I watched them troop up the jar, fall, troop up the jar then press their red maculae on the film. One following the lead of other, I watched them wriggle their sunflowerseed bodies between the seal and glass.

I felt bad and peeled the wrap off. Then in the near-dark I watched them poise on the rim and open their soft black elytra. Their gray wings came out and took them up the night, lighting glows as they left, their legs splayed back towards the jar like divers.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

 

In the shadow of the ympe-tre, the Fairyking utters to Queen Heurodis one of the most sinister decrees of all time. From the Auchinleck manuscript of Sir Orfeo (~1330), one of my favorite medieval poems:

“Loke, dame, tomorwe thatow be,
Right here under this ympe-tre,
And than thou schalt with ous go,
And live with ous evermo.
And yif thou makest ous y-let,
Whar thou be, thou worst y-fet,
And totore thine limes al,
That nothing help the no schal;
And thei thou best so totorn,
Yete thou worst with us y-borne.”

Anthony conquers Il Padrino.

The Trials of Anthony Lemon Episode II

Warning: Violence

A memento for when I get it right:

The blue strip of land between bay and the sky is Fire Island. Across the tops of the water shuffle black pyramids of static. Over the blue of the bay the sky opens into eternity forever and back. Wavenoise purls over the rocks of shore. Greened planks of the mole, toes chilly in the water raise up fiddler crabs. Breakers scuttle atop. Wind in my ears, melodies of bay and sky couple and sunder. In the sand, amidst stalks of green, wax-bodied ants and tics move while the sun, trailing copper and heat decays in its orbit to night, rolls up the planispheres and droops into a nightblue world.

Cars as slow as teeth.
Traffic chews on the highway,
Belching twilight clouds.

The last periwinkle fades from the sky and Rose’s life is at its end. All day her family members have come and gone. Now they open the blinds to let the yellow grief pour out of the house.

Mist falls and in the beams of the streetlamps it looks as if the air is crying. Like amber shards the pieces fall. Further down the street they compact a violet veil.

The mist in the air has called the mosquitos out of the woods. They sting.

Up into the grey air: the front of the house splashed in lemon light. The cars align head to heel in the driveway: all her coven have settled inside.

The lamps burn into the night; the green has faded. The dark brown underside of things show. In night the cladding glows in different hues of yellow.

Yellow the starcaps of flowers burst, proferred to the night with a daylight intensity, the blackblue air closing around the petals. Weeping, their anthers curl to keep all parts warm for the bees.

Night hushes and brings out crickets. A course of air, flowers and sound rival the still black and blue colors of the night. And all of this darkness bonds to the few lights in the windows. Yellow, they draw the eye amberly from its hideout in the shadows.

No colors survive. The prayers of lamps, no brighter than stones, push but cannot hide the dark.

Somewhere close a firecracker bangs against the sky. In the bluest hour nearing she will take her last breath, and pass.

6/23/2018

Bluepoint