Serious Moonlight & A Sea of Green
Spring Impressions
David Bowie sings Let’s dance in the moonlight, the serious moonlight.
Serious moonlight.
Stumbling out from the car, stretching, and a crunch across the driveway to the mailbox in the quiet country night, I see the shadows are getting serious, too, in the moonlight. The leaves are all in, the shadows are ink. The cricket frogs make the back pond a Geiger counter.
The landscape at night is a soft monochrome, the silver of winter yielding to the blocky shadows of a living forest. The moon can’t shine through the trees anymore, so the beams sneak by, giving cue to the Whippoorwill. She lays her eggs so they’ll hatch in time for both parents to hunt by full moonlight.
Monochrome seems to fit night: black and white, and Monotone a boring speaker. (Or the singers of Book of Love.)
But the green, man. The green. It crowds everything, grows, sprouts, unfurls, twines. I drove, because I’m always driving, through a sea of it. It turns the day monochrome, green and whatever other color dares. (Gas stations and road signs dare at night. A bank of iris or a red dirt scrape braves the day.)
The fresh walnut leaves glitter, green stars by the river bottom. Hickory sports a zesty lime roadside, and pines light their candles, keeping vigil, till their modest tint is a beacon again in the cold.
The ancient oak stands jaded by the church, telling the saplings about the baking heat on the way, when shirts cling to damp backs of parishioners and cicadas sing endless hymns to the sun. The lichen on the branches is an old green, somehow sad, seafoam of waves long past, one echo out of reach.
Someone has cut the emerald lawn. Even the air is green.
I breathe in as I fly by, window down, glad.
It’s raining tonight, so no shadows or moonbeams to float whippoorwill songs through the glade.
But it’ll be even more green tomorrow.
–Josh
