out-standing in my field

The plant that nightly makes meadows smell sweet is rightly named fragrant bedstraw, along with purple and pink vetch clinging to tall grass stalks full of grain, and daisies waving gently in the breeze, campion forming white pillowy clouds, and elecampagne sweet and low to the ground. Clover awash in white and red, and strawberry peeking from low-growing beds. Black-eyed susans and loosestrife, buttercups too, and parsnip and goutweed, goldenrod, alfalfa, dandelion, morning glory, aster, and the twinkling silver coming from the underbellies of waving leaves on the small aspens growing casually, five feet from the edge of the field, as if no one would notice their encroachment.

The sound of home is the rustle blue-green of these leaf beings on a summer night. A creature sound. They are tall and have stood there ever since I can remember. Can they remember me? I ask. I am a wild one, a small bark scrambler with barked shins, scratches where I scrabbled up the trunk, perfectly perching high above a burbling river bed. This is what the trees remember, my almost still gaze, blood pounding as I crouch, precious gasps as I wonder at the set of day, elated and pleased to be several dozen feet higher than usual as if I had gotten away with something.

My heart has always been in the heart of a certain field, a low point on the land but an open one from which the sky is apparent, and the nearby mountains make their presence known, the funny one shaped like an anvil. An itch that I've had since I was small urges me to run towards open sky, and standing here, I can see wide vistas. A glitter, the light reflecting off a metallic angel, that pilot and I the only ones who know the secret of this sky, its freedom. You and me, buddy. You and me. I don't envy him, whoever he is. He has to look at his instruments, and focus on work, and is surely above the brilliant color display. I in my field see it all pass before me. Like one of my trees, my glory is in watching the world passing by and furthering, becoming. Who else will take the time to notice? If I do not stand out in the field and gaze into this stretch of sky, my stretch of sky, with weather passing across the canvas in a brilliant ever-changing show of wonder, if I do not stand here, will someone else?

The colors of home are the light on hills at evening. How can green become so pink before it all goes dark blue? The clouds on up through the stratosphere each in their turn follow suit in a gentle blending motion. It is suddenly not fair that every sunset has been painted as if only in one moment, when sunsets are temporal events, changing from one moment to the next, now it is the most beautiful, no, now, now, now, until it's blue in gray or is it gray in blue? and I can no longer tell the clouds from the sky nor distinguish the patterns of the leaves and the dew brushes cool against my scraped shins and I turn my steps for home because the day is gone.