Mornings were best, the drive to Sonoma State on backroads, I cherished beauty, the way the fog wrapped itself around the hills, like a bride‘s négligée with emu, feathers. And they would hug the hills, cling to them, so that the lake, so smooth, not a ripple on the water, was like glass. And the world was one vast mirror of hill, fog and sky.
It took me years to grasp what beauty was, having grown up inside of beauty, I had no eyes to see. I had to go away way in order to return. Prodigal beauty was a jail sentence. Me, peeking out from inside the word, holding the iron bars, wondering what all the fuss was about.
But this lake, though man-made, reflects the fog and sky—beauty’s cnstant mirror, and I was a dust mote rising only to fall into that surface were sky in fog and water one thing—primordial—existing without my presence or witness. But beauty came dressed in fog to shroud the hills and the lake stood its ground, an eye of the sky watching me.
A fish rises and mouths a speck, concentric ripples, spreading out, catching me and its stare. First day of fall.
9/24/2004 writers group.
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