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“On censusing frogs in late July.”
It is the epitome of a
mid-summer’s evening. The air sits
like a sweating guest sipping lightening on the porch. It’s a day that
preached
the benefits of a nocturnal life-style. The green frogs croak, diligent
but not
ardent, taking their time as do the stars slowly appearing from behind
the last
wash of sunset.
This is a unifying nighttime
heat, so thorough and pervasive
that one cannot imagine the hour and its aura to be different anywhere
else
across the land. Like those legendary molecules of air once exhaled by
Napolean
and now, no doubt, entering my own lungs, that mosquito has surely
flown here
from dark and distant shores where all that differed was the word for
such a
thing as she.
Somewhere, nearer at hand, are
resting the butterflies which
I chased at midday as they loped above parched grass; brief bolts of
life,
adorned to the hilt with a beauty that reflects, if not our own beauty,
then at
least the color of our eyes. They and the frogs – so naïve, if one can
be naïve
when knowledge is not your language; and so direct, if one can be
direct when
there is no chance of duplicity. They are like this night: here and now
and
echoing with the antithesis of resonance. And we, whose minds and feet,
through
no self-earned honor, wander further, are left to ask the questions of
children
before elders – “What do I deserve? What do they deserve? And, who
holds whom?”
Complexity can hardly stun as
deeply as utter simplicity,
for we have layered so much atop our reality that to be mooned by the
skeletal
elements of our existence is cause enough to take one more deep breath
before
getting back in the car and heading home.
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