Reading September clouds

Through Axis café’s garage-door front, from beside a piece of art called Red Ginger, that I do not understand but has a feel of the exotic east, I see into the street. There are small slow movements at this hour. And the light that reflects off the bus moving by is lower and softer now.

Today I had a mind to rail against Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin—hailed now by a segment of Christians as prophets—and the weekend’s mimetic spectacle of the Restoring Honor rally and its unembarrassed leeching off of King’s I Have a Dream speech. But the real talent, that I do not yet possess, is how to exit the fascination that such a virtual gathering generates. The weary worship and hollow revival of the rally, the subsequent press squabble, the precipitous parodies, the retrenching of conservative and liberal—all so predictable and noncreative—still, and always, suck us into the perception that we are actively contributing to the righteousness of the world.

Instead I rehearse an ancient idea: To sit, and wait for a word from the edge; to walk, and wait to understand the mercy of the coming fall, the mercy of September air and the graceful uncertainty of September clouds.

To learn to read the signs at least as well as the clouds will be enough: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. The fall of all that Americ-esque a will be a mercy to the earth and her dwellers. The smaller fall, through rehearsed waiting, of my ambition, jealousies, and greed, will be present mercy for me.