Property Lines

The hardware store peddles a paint called Early Meadow, and another called Solstice, but they are dead things, flat emulsions entombed in tin cans like expired lard. They remain illiterate to the unruly bloodwork of June. To love the light through the trees is to witness a soft, concussive collision—the sun fracturing its knuckles against calloused bark, splintering into luminous needles that prick the soil until it vomits gold. It is the raw, heavy weight stuck in the throat of a robin just before it rips the morning open with a note as ragged as an old prayer.

If you ask me my favorite colour, I will not offer you a noun. Instead, I will give you those three seconds in the afternoon when the backyard holds its breath, and the maples ignite into an army of lanterns. In that moment, the world is not heavy. It goes thin as grease paper, and we are left standing     completely     unburdened in the overgrown weeds, eyes watering from the sharp salt of it, watching the scarred back of God’s hand pass straight through the screen door—leaving us bright, and ruined, and here.