Skinny Palms
While the west coast is sleeping, the day breaks on the Atlantic. In the east, skinny palms sway slightly in the day’s first light, ornamenting the night’s dénouement. The delicate zephyrs push their petals, dropping their inflorescent buds on the blacktop of Florida Mango Road. Lizards crawl through crabgrass; birds rush past anterior clouds backlit in violet, clouds all dressed in blue—patches of orange and red streak across the sky in the waning moments of dawn. A sun half risen; a sun half hidden. Can you feel the calm? The opening bit of a new day impressing on the body, casting new rays on uncovered skin. The moon fades and dies in parturition, a cleaner slate than the day I left behind.
The highway desolates, and the highway populates. It’s only a start through a fit of discontent and broken memory. Confronting the contention of recollection, gathering little moments of heartbreak and piecing them together with a soul’s superglue, a mosaic of tragic beauty. Where does all of this come from? Inching on the interstate, slinking forward to each preceding second like a step toward the peak of a mostly mountainous past chartered on an incline aiming at the sky, targeting the oranges and yellows on fire all arcing upward. Retaining walls and center dividers keep us straight, in orbit, an erasure spread out over the impermeability of time. On exit 61 off 95, I swear I can see the green growing against the gravity.
Sinking into the plush of daylight and high noon all my scars are burning, enflamed with the sickness of sun. Burnt now, I long for the coolness of fall, for the more subtle of understandings, like a veil of clouds over the hole burning in the welkin, burning through empyrean. Saturating the Everglades, all we know is war. If war is God, as Cormac says, I worship at the altar of my ever-bleeding mind. Profuse is the flow of exsanguination, seeping from my ear canal and palpebral. Only forward through the moments, discounting the loving hours, misplacing grace, displacing poise, uprooting tendrils, and losing balance. All the strength I saved for the day spent blindly fighting feelings, taking the time to talk a pep into my step while my feet struggle against the quicksand.
The sun dies in violet, receding toward the west, in the same shade that delivered it, now antenatal for another day. Weightless on the pier, the sun cascades, lighting the sky on fire. A deepening gradient, the sky turns sapphire as the water ripples across the inlet. I tried to pull the sun down all around me and fill my capsule with the last remaining light. In the day’s final tantrum, the air feels raptured and raucous, screaming in the eventide. The glow of gloam turns to darker isolation; light ceases, and the crickets applaud and howl with laughter at the last reaming spectator.
The skinny palms shutter, bending, but seldom do they break, their hollow trunks allowing a bow, a twist, and curl. They may all be rotted out, blackened by the persistence of hurricane warnings and torrential downpours. Somehow, they stand tall, heavy in the weight of attracting forces. In the moonlight, they rest and regain energy to sustain the next rising sun. I study their frames, all so easily shaken, yet none so easily broken. I’d like to learn their nature and study their stature, incorporating the fibrous roots, wiry trunks and flexible leaves into my own sculpture and figurine. A soul so rigid and fixed, I’d like to bend in the wind and stand tall against forces that rush across my boundary. From a small seed, a sprawling forest, from an achromatic sky, a cerulean horizon.
