Again Already, you don’t know what has passed, or when, precisely, it started. The sky has been shifting into something red for over an hour, and you’ve been blinking, taking a sip from a glass, turning a page of your book, daydreaming. The moment is close. The light is condensing into a smear of orange along the horizon, and then something happens—bee trapped inside the window, crash from the kitchen— and you’ve missed it. When I was small, my father once had me race up a long flight of unsteady, wooden stairs yelling run at my heels. Go. Faster, or you’ll miss it. And at the top of the stairs, we watched it again, the sunset. And that changed everything. He was thinking of math, the earth’s curvature and the great trick of altitude. He was thinking that he’d like to see again the sun slip into that particular evening’s end. And why shouldn’t he? Pointing off across the bay, out of breath, he lifted me to stand on the shaky rail where I swayed above a steep fall of blackberries, bees humming around the fruit as if they were in orbit around dark, clustered suns, thinking the sun couldn’t know what we’d just gotten away with. I knew it wasn’t magic, that time can’t be fooled. My legs burned from the run. I knew it was just quickness. Light. The relative pace of things. Our willingness to find ourselves out of breath above a humming decline of pollen. The sunset twice in one night, leading me to all this longing. Elizabeth Bradfield
30
Panhandler