Breathing Notes of Summer

The moon is a walrus whisker tonight, but light enough to give its round bulk illumination. Clouds in the late dusk take on smokestack puffs and black billows against the ringing dark blue above. This day had a streak to it, and endless motion, a bicycle pedal in circles. It is ending with a chunk of chocolate, my reward for meeting myself in the parking lot outside the Magistrate Court, and shaking my hand, apologizing from my still heart for my barking and serrated words, my slip in the mud. It felt like a bubble, a floating piece of myself liberated, leaving the rest of me airy, spacious, ready to keep moving without muscle flexes or jaw clenches. This day had rhythm, bit, bat, bijat, dat, dat, dat-tat-tat, bijat. Symbols in the sounds of wings when I stopped at a red light near the rodeo grounds. Looked like a redtail hawk streaking off toward the wonder of deep grass between town and the ridge of Blueberry Hill. Maybe it's harder to see the prey with the grass so high? But I see the arcs up there, the seeing, the scouting. They see me when I'm up high, circling my arms, trying to summon notes from my belly to see what they are, let them see who I am, hear them, be them, and release them to the ravens to take to the other side. Today there were smiles. Today there were cute old people, a little hunched, carrying things, but squinting bemusedly in the sun. Today they had things, to sell, to trade, to show in rows on blankets. And it is summer tonight, the bugs, though, staying silent, not done with the smoke after dinner, the nap after sex, the sucking on the green stalks that may never taste like this again. A map says that this place is brown and rocky, rugged like Mongolia, and yet the grasses of shangri la sway with crickets that crawl up through your drains and greet you in the morning shower with a hop and lick of their limbs. They do this with alacrity, and unlikely calm, with a studied crook of the leg, a veteran's poise. Venerable are these grasshoppers, hard kneed and agile, but in a way that strikes of age, of sage days talking to spiders and yippity rabbits, wiggling centipedes and tittering young birds, bloody worms and prairie dogs. Tonight all is quiet, no cicadas or meadow larks, or even magpies with their sing-song derision. It is easy, easy, dark with no breeze, promise of 29 days of moon cycle, at the end of which all may be different, all may be transformed into the high praise of the corn days, the pale blue of the ocean sky a thousand miles west, the sting of salt from sweat in the eyes of a hiker nearing the peaks, beating a thunderstorm up the slope, smelling the end. Already? A season ahead we live, maybe two, and where will we be then? It is ok to be in the quiet, only 3 days into summer, nothing to hold onto, nothing to shed. I can always smell winter and the bones of large animals, but the stew can wait, and I look forward to sleep and that walking I do, out and out into the boundaries, floating along the prickled ground, searching for the notes I keep breathing out.