Wednesday, March 02, 2011

I don't believe the sky

I don’t even believe the sky tonight. Like I haven’t seen those fake blues and whites swirled and streaked on some impressionist’s canvass before. It’s a little too obvious. The colors are childish. The blues are too happy and sparkly, and the white is bright, and the grays and blacks came straight out of a carton of Crayola crayons. In fact the whole thing looks colored for a Hallmark card. These clouds are stock clouds from a children’s coloring book, puffy in the middle, complete with silver linings, stretching out in completely predictable patterns.

If you ask me, it actually looks like someone scraped the ceiling of the sky. The whole world tried to drive into a parking garage and the sign clearly said Clearance 8’ and whoever was at the wheel just kept on driving and peeled parts of the roof off and now there are stars peeking through the brand new skylights. Where there is still a bit of roof left, it crumpled, leaving uneven strips of cloud metal running warped toward the horizon. Obviously these clouds really were lined with some sort of silver, and now pieces of that are poking through like a set of old, bald tires.

But it’s getting dark now, and the light is falling. And I can’t really remember what I saw. Just fading images of a blue field plowed up with tiny, shining seeds here and there as though a careless farmer had a hole in his pocket. Or maybe it was a blue beach dotted with sand crystals while foaming tides like searching hands try to pull the earth into the deep. But I can’t remember now, and it was all so fabricated and unbelievable and childish.

Which is why I will be just as surprised and incredulous tomorrow night and every night.

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