A PORTRAIT OF DUSK

This light is nothing but luminous, shuttering and unshuttering. In Mother’s unraveling, the night becomes a frame for this abstract art, where her hand unpaints the window’s dusk, soft and sudsy.

While Mother, looking in, watches our muted, smoky portraits shift, she blurs out of focus. The blinds bow, as dim and fibrous as wings, a wild, innocent struggle against gravity.

Outside, our steps are magnified. Our shadows elongate in the fluid mosaic of twitching, shaded leaves. We sublimate in this slender forest, where neighbor’s plants form intercrossing light-rails racing away from points of contact.

The sky thaws, its belly babbling with the matchsticks of leathery palm trees. Hear the muted blinker fade and the rustle of blue fever collapse into our backdrop. We drift under traffic lights rusted with decades, squeeze by monoliths of trees drooping, concave with centuries of memory.

Delirious, headlights swerve over the swan-necked field, where cicadas puzzle over the spatter of gold against jeweled leaves. They know the night better than us, swimming through it in their engineered wings, watching us marvel anew at the sear of our touch on nature.

Each green-yellow window floating to the foreground frames geometric shelves and empty cashiers’ stations. Shiny slabs of fish and bright candies defrosting into mellowed, watery lime.

We sink through dark curtains. A lidless searchlight illuminates an abandoned barn’s door. We glance away, unable to meet its eyes.

A cuckoo bird chirps; faint green flows; cars whisk somberly past in a predetermined procession. Black stations loom out of the fog, cradling hushed, empty benches.

Red, corrugated, a train clouds the skyline, melting and unmelting.

Its mouth swills the air into static, while we rediscover the rhythms of walking––reeling, reborn in the wind, the way it is impossible for us to rest in a body locked into motion.