Lighthouse Extinguished

Today I taste the sour regret of nature’s fragility. The notion of ‘next time’ does not occur to the windswept oak and its moribund leaves. Nor does it entice that cornflower’s nascent bud, who’s youth makes a promise of fallacious longevity. Beyond the cauterized roadways of steel shafted modernity is a world that exists only in moment. There is no replay on the finch’s song, no weld for fallen petals or paint for now lurid and tired leaves.

 

This moment, my loss was the White Spirea. Each cloud like bulb had stood tall and proud above a sea of shingled green. It both invited and refracted that heavenly warmth from the afternoon sun, and its constant sepia rays, so that it resembled less a plant than a many faceted lighthouse. But a cursed lighthouse it would have been, for rather than guide away, it seemed to call forth those fat bodied, winged and striped ships. The buzz from their bows filled every sense, so pervasive the air itself was alight in their rapid beat. No, the Spirea would not have made for a lighthouse, I thought, as I watched bee after bumbling bee run ashore its soft and spongey crags.

 

It was the perfect number of bees. Enough to inspire industry, to call forth images of mid-century steelmen on a day of hard labor. Trade pollen for pint, hive for cathouse and there may be no difference at all. There was a bee for every flowering head, pairings so well counted as to evidence their ascension toward mental superiority. One bee more, and the scene would have been of crowd. For though the Spirea boasted a great number of gleaming lanterns, each lit in its own perfect shade of early summer white, there is an axis which once crossed resembles little more than chaos. But, just one bee less, and the whole world may have felt bare. The sun setting beyond a tundra of icy white drifts. A hopeless and empty expanse in which any movement feels both too little and entirely too much. No, it was the right number of bees, each choreographed perfectly to their task. For wasted movement was absent from that park-side work-sight, unless of course one decides that to frolic and dance is to deign. Fat bodies swung through the air like chandeliers lost at sea, like pendulum balls cut free from wire, like apples in bobbing river.

 

As far as a lighthouse can exude happiness, or perhaps more appropriately, pride, then it was painted upon each round and bouncing face of this White Spirea. At any moment I expected whole stalks to shear free from the ground, to launch upward in long and graceful arcs across a sky of pallid blue, like migrating storks, where, once at some unidentifiable apex, they would explode in whites both electrifying and demure. No stalks broke free during the mere minutes I sat there. There was no time for the scenes from my lurid dreams.

 

Though it was not yet a quarter through the epoch marking the bee’s harried workday, I moved on. I was hot, for the not distant bay had spewed across its coastline a blanket of thick and humid air, and close as I was to its lapping shores, that air laid heavy on my brow. “I’ll be back tomorrow” rang in my mind.

 

It was a lie of two parts. For it would be days before I returned to sit on that park bench, to gaze again upon the delicate boughs of the once proud Spirea. But even had I returned the day following, nature waits for no one. The bees keep a schedule known only to those in the inner sanctum of their hallowed hive, and the Spirea itself cannot be expected to maintain such a prominent pose even a second longer than it must. Like all lighthouses that live long enough to see the coastline erode, to watch shipping lanes metamorphose, the Spirea would send out its final beam of light in a low and lonely blaze.

 

When I returned after three days, it was over. A bullet’s casing, the Spirea sat alone, spent, sad. Color had infected those once pure clouds, and now the forecast spoke not of pale pillows, but of ochre muck rained from above. I’d like to think the bees had been there at the end, a frantic assembly line shuttling out the last precious resources before the tower crumbles. Now the quiet lighthouse is patrolled by one lone wasp, a coastal scavenger armed with munitions against any who might be hiding amongst the stony wreckage.

 

Sour I called it. That taste of loss, that poignant cry of fleeting beauty. Let it serve reminder, for this land belongs to them; the bleating sun, the stifling air, the bumbling bee, and the fragile flower. We may write out our own time tables, dictate law, and pave road, but the world will always belong to them.