Haibun: Cresting
Summer seems to be a collection of new things. I suppose every season is. Snow is the collection of all things cold and snow, spring of new life and fall as the collection of the last hurrah.
But summer, summer is the collection of things cresting. The sun reaches its longest stretch in the sky first, and as it ebbs away, the fields start to crest to their heights.
Most of these changes go unnoticed or go subtly. Nothing rushes in summer, it is too hot for rushing. But also, cresting is the slow motion of rising and falling. When something moves towards its peak, like the sun in the sky, it seems to slow as it goes between 10am and 2pm because it is cresting. But when the sun near dusk’s edge, it falls faster and faster like a marble bumped off the board and heading towards the tables edge.
Now I suppose the streams aren’t cresting. They tend to find a more meandering pace, slowing a bit. Spring is when the streams crest. And here in the drought of the west where all our water is over allocated, streams disappear not too long after spring.
So summer is some kind of collection of identifiers, maybe it really isn’t cresting, but heat is too cliche, so cresting can work in its incompleteness. And every day I get out of bed I work through my incompleteness and somehow make enough work to do it again the next day. So I will push on with cresting.
as the waters warm, sky fills
like summer dust storms
