The Cusp of Rain

Places where it never stops raining and

Places where it never starts

Miss out on the slow preparation, the build towards

The inevitable downpour.

It’s a taste on the tongue, on the air,

Thick and earthy, with an undercurrent of ozone.

It is a heaviness against the skin.

It is the way the birds startle upwards and flee into the branches.

It is a yielding sigh of a breeze, tracing moisture across cheeks and hands,

Prelude to the heavier bath.

That balance can sit and build and wait.

It is more teasing, more subtle than the profane glory of the storm

And almost as subtle as the aftermath.

Almost as subtle as the delicate lacing left

On the nasturtiums in the gravel.

The hands of life and destruction can be as delicate as they are overwhelming

Both the subtle and the non-subtle aspects of nature fascinate me.

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For more and less subtle preludes, my fantasy novel, The Guests of Honor, is available here. Its sequel, With Honor Intact, can be found here.

 

 

Later,

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To Spin, To Tell

After the storm, the funnel spiders are revealed.

In the wash of drops from the trees, those webs spun with such care to invisibility

Are suddenly, irrevocably forced into view.

The meadows are wreathed with their work-

Fine-spun, delicately interwoven lines

Intersecting, guiding to the heart

Of the spider’s lair.

The spin of words is often more clumsy

But that heart sits at the center

Waiting to grasp the tangled visitors

And taste the audience’s appreciation.

All that is spun guides into the maw of the builder

I have a deep appreciation for spinners, delicate and otherwise.

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For more metaphorical webs, my fantasy novel, The Guests of Honor, is available here. Its sequel, With Honor Intact, can be found here.

Grasping the Sun

In the long barren land between the forest and the settled places,

In a landscape memorial to  thwarted dreams and ambitions,

(Left as empty as the developer’s wallet)

Small things grow.

A patch of clover peeks above the burn scar,

An alder and an elderberry twine in stunted harmony,

But

Above them all,

Careless of poor soil and bitter winds,

A lone sunflower

Knows nothing of caution

Knows only to reach upwards

Always closer to its eventual

Grasping of the sun.

Ambition, bright and beautiful

I have a deep admiration for persistence in the face of impossible goals.

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For more persistence, impossible and otherwise, my fantasy novel, The Guests of Honor, is available here. Its sequel, With Honor Intact, can be found here.

The Scars of Passage

The railways were the veins and arteries of the smallest towns.

From the sky, you can still see them,

The communities that blossom around those threading lines,

And the scars in the land where other towns once stood

And passed into forest,

Into great thick slides of mud, washed into the river.

Railways are surgical cuts

Through lands that attempt to fight the operation.

They provide passage,

But they also carry infection.

Back in the deep country

Following the lines of metal

It is easy to see the other cargo of the trains

The plants from foreign countries,

The strange insects that sit on the trees,

The eyes of creatures that do not belong

Looking up from the underbrush.

Even when the houses and the people have passed,

The tattoo of our presence is burnt into the soil

A cluster of thistles,

Seeding into the autumn wind.

Carelessness can leave more permanent marks than deliberation

It is interesting to see the intersection of the natural and the built, and the unexpected ways that human presence persists.

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For more points of intersection, my fantasy novel, The Guests of Honor, is available here. Its sequel, With Honor Intact, can be found here.