Lakeside Sunset

The eyes of the earth blink hazily as the natural world drifts into its bedtime routine. The air sighs a sleepy yawn under which the trees stretch then wilt warmly. Dreamily they gaze at their black reflections in the lavender lake, that slowly solidifies to reflect an oil painting of the sky. The sky is the stillest thing you’ve ever seen - a creamy wash of peach, blush, and blue that holds three celestial bodies - the sun- a golden stone, that left a blazen trail, as it skipped a thousand waves to get to that far away place between the mountains - Venus - an isolated beauty mark that sparkles on the face of the sky - and the moon- a sly, thin, white smile you aren’t sure you should trust. Below, the liquid horizon is kind, and delivers me bits of the cotton candy painting softly on each gentle wave. They lick my ankles one by one, urging me to plunge. But in my cuffed jeans I kick them off, and send them rippling back to meet in the middle, a most playful wake that makes me wish I could join. How velvety it would feel to swim through these undisturbed colors - to swim all the way to the sun. But the evening mountain air is mildly forbidding, and I wrap my flannel tighter. Slowly before my eyes, the moonlight washes the painting away. The dying colors are splashed with indigo before they dissolve into dimness. And just like that, the masterpiece of sun and sky held between that certain spot in the mountains, over that particular bit of lake, is gone forever, never to be kept, never to be sold, never to be passed on. This bit of painted sky is just for the eyes that see it this evening. As a frenzied painter would white out his canvas in lieu of his next design, so the sky surrender’s its colorful clothes, so it can don something new tomorrow. One can only hope there was an artist around to see, who could reproduce the beauty in song or poem or painting, so that another of the earth’s countless fleeting beauties might be shared as it ought be.