"Sparrows shoot over the white earth."
-Noah Eli Gordon
I forgot to write about September. The perfect outline of trees against the sky that folds itself into yellow. These green-going-to-yellow, writes Marvin Bell. There is yellow behind everything always. Always the tint of eternity. A field of white flowers before yellow. The grasses and mullein holding in the noise of creatures. Everything in September is stealth and fear, stealth and even the distant voice of a child is a disappearing act. The voice of someone cradling twilight. In September, a small bird flew under the grill of the car as I drove. Its death was a batter of bones, wings like shells.
I wished the last days of summer were a paradise. Their sound was the sound of kadosh, kadosh, kadosh.
Liz pulled tomatoes from a vine and they were garnet and carnel orbs in my hands. They were as perfect as fire.
There was a heron standing in a lake off Highway 66. It rose like a clean shadow, tall and gray from the water that had a surface bending yellow and silver in late afternoon sun. It was warming itself beneath the corn-colored sky, waiting for night, oblivious to the highway that hushes all wings and wonders.
