Silhouettes – 08/09/2019

The days of silhouettes return.  A young owl screeches for its breakfast from a nest in the tall pines, a silhouette against a two-dimensional sky.  A fading Orion makes a brief appearance before a dark silhouette slides across the flat celestial canvas and a soft rain cools the scene.  Morning walks move me into the realm of the large grazing animals, silhouettes against the ragged brush.  The silhouettes of three gorging bucks in pastoral commune defies the image of their hormonal hostilities coming soon with the abandonment of this thin façade of peace.  Then we are both startled by a surprise encounter along the path.  We each observe the other’s body language as the earliest twilight reveals form but not intent.  Her head is raised and she continues to chew but there is a rigid flex of her muscles.  Her hooves dig in.  The spring-loaded power of those skinny legs creates tight waves of energy rippling through the grass, traversing the short distance between us.  As it is predawn, she questions my presence on the trail.  The constant whir of one thousand chirping crickets pauses for a moment in anticipation of the coming confrontation.  I move slowly, averting my eyes, gesturing calmly in a nonverbal attempt to express a lack of hostility.  She does not move.  She is not ready to surrender her position.  She holds the good ground.  I speak softly, explaining that I need to go up the trail.  She is not happy with me disturbing her daily constitutional, insisting that she regularly browses in this spot, at this time.  I counter that I often walk this trail around 5:00 AM and have not had a problem in the past.  She scoffs at my mechanical understanding of time.  “Earliest twilight,” she uses against me, is not a time on a clock.  She argues that her time is not governed by quantum vibrations of digital devices counting the artificial divisions of arbitrary units invented to advance commerce.  When I concede to her logic I detect a coy smile, like a pretty bartender angling for a big tip.  She is willing to give me the road.

Peas and Hominy