Morning Observations

Through the French doors, the early morning hues invite my words, so I step outside with my coffee and books in hand—always books in hand—those for reading and feeding my mind, journals to allow my mind freedom. 

The humidity has returned overnight, much like an unwanted guest—unwanted guest, like the groundhog, who has overstayed his welcome. I peruse his damage to the garden below; the chewed upon leaves of young sunflowers and the flattened borage he's spiraled into crop circles with his rolling body. I can't blame, though. I, too, would gladly nestle myself amongst the borage, watching fat-bottomed bees drunk with pollen navigate each star-shaped blossom. 

Even at this early angle the sun is blistering hot, so I adjust my shade, and in doing so, knock loose the lady spider's web—spider silk floating freely as if spirit thoughts—catching sunlight and reflecting it like some perverse mirror that eludes all mortal rigidity, and should you catch a glimpse of yourself within it, you'd see your perspicuity, straight through to your soul. I, like with spiders of any size, felt a twinge of fear that first evening I watched her small frame build a web above the chiminea, strategically positioned between two of the strung cafe lights. I couldn't help but think of the tale of horror she was weaving—but as I watched her, I felt  my repulsion turn to curiosity, and I eventually found myself meditating on her beauty of being—toiling at her craft; the dedication and determination, the perseverance and resilience, the imperfections, and daily mending; the weaver, the design, the hunger, the mother—I look for her each morning and each evening; a constant, for now.

Like my children grow, the tomato plants have gotten taller in the hours of sleep, and they've taken on a bespeckled look; branches of yellow flowers, some heavy with fruit. But as my eye shifts with the sunlight, minuscule webs are found secreted within the green—I believe these spiders to be cartographers of sorts, mapping mazes of fatum. 

The swallowtail caterpillars are fat with dill, and I suppose, rather than moving to the parsley, they'll simply move on—to phase, to morph, to be. 

A cabbage moth flutters about ghostly, alighting on a zucchini vine, allowing me its company for a minute or two, before rising and breezing past the lavender.

Overhead, the mockingbirds are busy flying from the black locust to the ghost tree and straight through the azure expanse to their point of origin. The blue jay is masked by maple shade, but his metallic scratch at the atmosphere gives him away. The blackbirds perch on rooftops and the chain link fence, always with eyes lit in curiosity that equates to hilarity on my end. They eat and splash in the birdbath with an abandon that can only be matched by a toddler. When one calls forth, my mind is alive with the image of a weathered swing chain, metal grinding against metal in a crying out of pain with every pump and kick. Birdsong rises—mourning doves, the cardinal, finches, robins—I must've missed the woodpecker, an earlier riser than I, he is.

What I do miss within this silence of nature—this green and alive noise—is the percussive beat of cicada rhythm. July is visible, and still no cicadas. The leaves high in the sycamore attempt to build in crescendo similar to what I long to hear, but it dies with the wind downing. I can't quite properly explain the connection I feel with the cicada; a lifelong fusion of we two. Perhaps I buried pieces of my childhood within their hum and I'm awaiting them to sing them back to me. Maybe they say in sound what I can't vocalize in spoken words. I may very well have lived another time that sent me into the afterlife with a jade cicada amulet on my tongue. John Berger wrote, "Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to." What a romantic notion—that I, flesh and marrow, may very well be, a cicada reincarnated as a poet, finally writing the poems I always longed to—and I wait for the song that sirens me—

—I await—

E.A. O'Connell

I take up the spade, slicing the lush grass, upturning clods of dirt sewn by root threads, the distinct sound of surrender slashes the stalled humid night, rocks I unearth are meticulously pyred, their puzzle-fit a testament to my persistence and patience, four feet down I forgo the use of the spade, continuing my work on my hands and knees, on my belly when I begin to tire, my nails broken and bloody, my hands unrelenting in their toil, gouging the earth slowing to a scraping, my fingers cramped, my bruised body caked in sweat-made mud, finally halting, wracked with heavy breathing, I’m night blind and lost to the phosphenes, the rattle that stutters my lungs, gives a momentary cardiac arrest that resets my respirations and gives me the surge of revival, slowly rolling on my back, my hand instinctively splaying my stomach, and I watch as the stars float free of their atmospheric restraints, flashing a bioluminescent romance language of L'été that enchants me with distant memories of innocence, I foetal myself to preserve the moment and find myself longing for the comfort of a bedsheet, the thin layer of protection from spying satellite eyes, they’ll record me vulnerable and leak the secret, I toe the edge of anxiety, until the moony haze of honeysuckle pales my fears, and I’m lost to the memory of dusty quarry shelves cobwebbed in honeysuckle vines, I can bury myself one hundred times over and I’d still be me, I can’t rewrite the history, nor his going away, I can bed down under moss and become a maze of nourishment for arachnids and night crawlers, but I’m not the dead, so I pull myself up and climb out my grave, scooping the dirt back in, I feel a tug of reluctance, the fear of relinquishing a half to me, sitting and sifting the dirt atop my plot of earth, I decide it’s time to seed my grief and allow time to take its course, and the strangest of things happened, from that sorrow and my toil, sprouted a new species of happiness, to which I tended…

E.A. O'Connell

Dream Series {Excerpt}

A windowless, doorless cabin, lit in incandescence from hundreds of candles…a warm evening, sky of a soft melon pink, the trees and grass bathed in the aura of lavender…a serene pond of mirror perfection, nothing but nature to bear witness… standing at a butcher block kitchen counter, knife in hand, scrawling sharp sigils within honeyed flesh, halving pomegranates…adorned in a flowing white dress, I’m awakened to a presence, my body aware of an energy…turning…on the opposite bank of the pond, grass knee height, dressed in all black…he stands…staring…motionless, emotionless…I walk towards the edge of placidity…our reflections cast…a blue heron comes into focus, poetically turning its head, a recognition, first of him and then I…the mirror of star birthing sky, transmutates to obsidian scrying depth…and he walks towards it…stepping within the liquified night…his eyes never leaving mine…towards me he walks, and I towards him, one step closer for every three of his…until I relinquish the fear and give away the doubt…the release, running in thigh-high water…within his reach, he takes me into his arms…the heron takes off in silent flight, wings in curve above our heads, allow for his words, whispered to my neck, to echo and resonate within the darkness… …

E.A. O'Connell

I drove towards the burning bright, glinting off glass was every mistake I’d ever given time and additional thought, the familiar winding road became a catalyst for visitation, and as I felt the tug to look at the rear view mirror for what was in chase, I shattered the setback, set forth in a flurry of milkweed down, floating freely with no direction, afternoon sun setting fire to the green of grass and leaves… …I lay beneath the oleander lances, the evening rain a slow free form rhythm, building intensity, the clouds in methodical Rorschach morph, gray on gray on white trumpets, dripping a deadly sweet cleanse, lacing my vision and speech in the toxicity of nature’s beauty, giving reach to the hedge that divides the living from the dead… …Under windows of stars and a near absent moon, a scream escaped from the ruins of gables and stone, an answer seeking its question, my head awakened with language in a whispered reverse, my body aware of a beastly hunger, the wind calling forward…I tread…

E.A. O'Connell