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
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