Limnal commuting

This time of year, I leave at night's shading: the sky no longer black but cobalt turning palest blue in the east, with a touch of orange at the edge of the mountain; the stars reduced to a dozen brightest, now bare pricks of white. The neighborhood is silhouettes without hues, the tallest pines, palms, palo verdes standing black in the air. (Ours is a dark city, in support of the nearby observatories -- streetlights only on major boulevards.) I walk the gray streets* by myself.

Or almost by myself: the desert has other citizens. Coyotes heading back to the wash -- we give each other wide berths. Doves roosting on the ground, who squitter away when I'm almost on top of them. Very rarely, hunchbacked javalinas. This morning, a great-horned owl hooted from a telephone pole, twenty feet from her plastic replica, racked in a tv antenna as a scaredove. And the other birds, of course, waking to the world in twitter, jug-jug, cu-hou, squawk.

If a porch light catches it right, I see my cloud breath.

By the time I cross the sandy wash, the eastern sky is a watercolor wash of yellow, and the stars gone. Cars and houses intimate at colors. I duck past the barrier to the backside of a shopping center with its sodium lights and squamous dumpsters, and around the corner is the busy intersection: my return to the mortal world. Across the avenue is my office.

* We're as weak on sidewalks as lighting.

---L.