Phoenix World and the Sparrow's Song

The deep-set gloom of the night grips tightly to the backdrop of the world. The moon's visage slowly becomes more and more transparent against the lightening sky. Mercury blooms like a star flower just above the eastern horizon as the cyclops sun slowly opens its eye upon a sleeping hemisphere.

In late-autumn and early winter, small puddles of ice begin to crack and spit against the warming air. The lunar kiss spread across them like a silver thread begins to warp and curl beneath the blazing rage of the sun's unquenchable desire. Contrails spread across the burning dawn like strings of pale seaweed marking  aerial highways before fading into a cerulean abyss, the ocean's convected reflection where birds become fish swimming through coral clouds and jets trundle along like shrimp boats into the indiscriminate edge of the world where the clay meets the sky.

The bellies of clouds boil with a red fury as the mountaintops set fire to the eastern sky and the peach hue of a dying night makes way for the day. Sparrows sing their morning song from the bare branches of a Formosa tree near the path of abandoned inter-county railroad tracks. Chattering like early-risen school children, they flutter like dying autumn leaves clinging to the branches of their migratory home.

I pull the collar up on my wool coat and tug the lapel in tight around my neck, trying in vain to block out the bite of an early morning in late-autumn. The pink lady feels slick against my gloved hands as I watch the orange shine of a fully awakened sun simmer just above the ridges of the distant mountain range. I take the first bite of the apple and hold the tart yet sweet pieces in my mouth, allowing the juices to soak into my tongue and coat the insides of my mouth before chewing. At the edge of a field to my left two deer stand as if engraved against the backdrop of tall, beige saw grass that seems to stretch to the edge of the universe. The doe keeps watch as her baby crunches on an apple core that I left the morning before.

We crunch in unison, the baby deer and I. In unison with each other, with the sparrows as they fine tune their morning song, with the sun as it paints a portrait of the awakening world, with the puddles as they break free from the thin sheen of moon ice, with the contrails as they cut and heal like a pale scratch against the skin of the sky, and with the mountains as they breathe hot upward toward the heavens. We live in unison with the phoenix world, reborn from the ashes of a previous day forgot.

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