Weather Ball Blue
A string of traffic lights turn red, red, yellow, green as mist spreads throughout Heartside—from Division and Fountain, up Fountain at College, into Heritage Hill—then settles like billows of cloud. Hours are equal parts day and night and propel the propeller-like seed of a maple from the branch of its beginning into a well-kept yard; a precocious child who had been admiring its leaves—yellow-orange bedded in reddish brown—and singing to himself, retrieves it and contemplates the paper-thin skin of its wings. Fog diffuses incoming and outgoing headlights, cloaks a neighbor out raking—or picking up pinecones, or gathering apples, or landscaping with miniature flagpoles and an assortment of squash. Everywhere is wet. At noon the sun is close to the center of the sky, and the moon is as it always is in relation to the sun. Mist lifts, and the child loses interests in the maple’s fruit to tumble, yet almost injures his neck throughout a handspring. At my feet, a harvester ant, with its jaws locked around a sunflower seed, on the pheromones of another’s trail, avoids inconspicuous traps, and transports it from one end to another. At sunset, long after pruning shrubs, a neighbor retires. A raccoon crawls across a road, a cat slinks, a possum slouches but is not as lucky—nor is a skunk.
maple, sassafras
oak, sycamore: lively trees,
common as breathing
