Limnal commuting
5 January 2006 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerThis 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.
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.