GREEN CANOPY
PITCH THE GREEN CANOPY
Clear, clear night he picked to get his bearings at sea after shipwreck; deeper, cleaner into bottoms up this high-fall season. The ballast being the green leaves and grass that invites you to plant your feet steadfast no farther than the eye can see, so raspberry red, pumpkin orange and fool’s gold birch say sally forth knock-kneed and wobbling and tumble where you might with the whole stretched dome yawning beneath your feet.
Venturesome industry took hold of him this season. Psst, touts from everywhere beckoned, bargains afoot, high returns, dazzling windfalls kicked up at every step. And spent in a wink, and another offered, so out into the bright dark to be grabbed by the sinew itself that was rocking the boat this early October, hiking trails in the woods and along ridges, guessing at the stars’ fragile hold on the rafters, looking for what spilled, what necessarily spilled as perceived by a head purged of grave responsibilities.
Emu egg was his thought for the rock on the deer trail he was following. That size and on its own and the potter’s craft upon its shape, no hewing on it, and put it in his back pack. Not that it could be an emu’s egg but emu eggs struck him as drunken science and were objects of his affection. A tribute to an egg, sculpted from marble, and the green-blue gauche on it a planetarium view of a day sky that might be the foiled desire of heavy-footed, flightless birds, what filled their bird brains, an envy become religious icon. Enough seasonal harmony in the association for him to shoulder the graceless tome.
The furnace was running, double panes on the window, he shrugged off his pack and shed his woolens, squinting against the lights he flicked on. He pulled his prize from the pack. It was a tactile find, probably to be passed up in daytime. Amazing smooth it was considering the place he’d found it. In a stream it would have been lost in the crowd, even a bit dowdy in comparison. A finer stuff had shaped it and unlikely ridge where it had stumped his toe and closer to bare-assed sky than any nursery for rocks, it was empty space that had polished it, and time stretched thin. However, it was no meteor an emeritus astronomy professor could say with assurance. Smooth, calico coat, but no heat annealed facets, should it have sluiced from a heavenly horde, soaring down on feathery wings would have been its agent, a great swan requisitioned from myth. He laid it on the coffee table in front of the couch. In the incubating warmth, removed his shoes, placed his feet in woolen socks beside it, and soon nodded off. The moths repelling on the window panes not completely silent, skittering a bit, and he without reckonable mass out there, eating from the dark fabric as moths do wool.
He awoke from his nap-a seventy-five year old man wafts his way into dementia during such faints and wakes with childhood superstition or insight and more, the frightened, gullible wariness and opportunism of the child incubus he carries. He spotted that the rock had turned a bit and it was certainly a dragon’s eye had watched him while he slept, he now knew for the brief moment before some scrim of psychology could be painted over revelations. He’d kicked it in that nerve reflex just at slumber’s border as the anesthesia takes effect, obviously. Still, his mind played in the gifted grog from his nap, and spun a tale as the old star gazer climbed the stairs to his bedroom carrying his boots to insure finding them in the morning, at least a better chance. He was long a victim of his disembodied eye traveling the interstellar lanes, a napping state long preserved in his profession though now lost to subsequent generations. And it’s to be noted that out there he had been permeable to dreams and whispers common to the mane, mermaids of a different stripe, horsemen, hunters, and mostly as is the case, a longer for the sea spume kicked up by the prow, the dolphins that surge upon the driving urge of amour captains the eye. Had cost him the respect of institutions those crowded seas of Byzantium. The amorous flesh of god and math, the choruses out there, raining down inherited melancholy and destined loves. It was fall, more foot loose and fancy free, a license to events and adulturies. Monsters about with tenderness in their hearts, all souls night in the offing, its churning descent already inspiring the unrequited.
The old man racked it up, doused the bedside lamp and went to sleep.
Clunk. A real, unapologetic thump from downstairs.
What give him the courage to search for a clumsy culprit? The worse alternative of lying in bed with his imagination going hypochondriac. He’d left the light on downstairs and descended without flashlight or flicking on the light in his own room. Oh yes, he sensed someone had been here; you feel such things. But, the cause of the clunk was the stone had broken open and a longitudinal half had dropped from table top to floor. Now, that a stone may ripen until its cup runneth over is hardly likely, but what sights a dragon’s eye may have seen, and more to the point, the broken stone revealed itself a diode, and retina or no, in a petit glittering cosmos destiny piping can’t entirely be ruled out. Just such a thread ran through its black yolk to the batty astronomer walking a trail and its own imminent hatching. It was in the right hands. And now he noticed the kitchen door was open to the whole wide night and he went to close it. The chill smelled snow and he was too slow to close it off before he let himself be drawn outside.
Uncanny bright out there this moonless night. Snow had fallen and he mused on a crash of silence must first have startled him from sleep, a crescendo or an overture for the snow fall that spilled over brimming from sleeveless reaches. The intent expressed in the transparent humming that migrated through each thing and lit them from inside so that now he needed no more than this heartfelt roll call to lead him forth without stumbling. Snow, the drifting fall of mourning angel’s wings, such far fetched longing oversaw his steps.
The white sheet was scripted by cuneform starting at his slab porch. And the ode finished with the faun herself under the crippled apple tree. Drastic surgery inflicted on this old tree, only one of its major limbs had been spared the saw, and from this one limb a flare of smaller limbs still offered apples. He would give her one. It was love at first sight; he would give her an apple. A hard time for a faun with winter in the offing, but bright hopes were on her. An innocence tested against greater odds might prove more complete. And his was puppy love, lucky find, for it is boundless. Sighting him, she leapt and pranced. She fancied him and took the apple from his hand. First love, the natural outcome of innocence cleared of debris or yet to be encumbered by it, the creature falls into the globe’s singing heart.
She led him and he picked apples from the dying tree and she ate them from his flattened palm. She led him through cold reaches, the first dusting from the flensed skies, this old man who had left only his peak roofed cottage prow in the heavens, his sprightly walk and his head among the stars. All he had was this heavenly harvest that so completely whispered requited as a plea. He followed her and what she touched blossomed and recited its verse, and they found him beneath Orion, and on a table in his house they found a diode whose sparkling traced clearly a faun’s prancing leap. And some few noticed or could have noticed around the vacated body found along a route of pure serendipity in the moonless night, a constellation drawn by what before the stars impelled their brilliance. Faun could be seen in it, changeling it was, a girl’s face or an island city, and constant through them all the ligaments of a throat just bursting into song.
