The best time is dawn, when the first flimsy shafts of sun stream across the eastern sky, high above the bald, black peaks of the desert mountains, where coyote dens lay hidden between the boulders and rattlesnakes slither for the deep protective dark of their claustrophobic hollows. Doves coo softly across the street, and I wake each morning and wonder why they’re so content. 

There is a glassy coolness on the air, but it is dissipating quickly, like the moisture which stubbornly clings to the palm leaves and cactus and ferns and flowers. I climb down from my loft, naked as the cloudless sky, swathed only in conspicuous quiet, in the lassitude which follows ruptured dreams, down into the aromas of roasted coffee and dry desert air, down into expectation and fortuitous event, into the sounds of softly cooing doves, thankful for another chance to play.  

The best time is mid-afternoon: The sun is grizzly and unrelenting, but in the shade of my large umbrella and, under it, a table laden with gin and lime, tonic–water and ice, books and paper, oranges and magazines, the dry sandpaper heat is deflected to mere dribbles of sweat and mild exasperation. Sunglasses are essential, as the glossy white pages seem to glow radiantly--dispense with the shirt, more ice. 

It’s the height of the killing day--no bugs, no ants, nothing on the ground that isn’t already dead. The flower petals are shut tight to the death rays of life-giving sun. The leaves of ferns are withered as if they might wrap themselves up in their own puny shade, crawl within themselves, parched, but surviving the scorching. There is the faint rumble of the city in the distance, but all is fantastically still, here. I’d be drowned in the sullen listless air but for this pocket of life in the umbrella’s shade. And I feel watched and envied for it. But even that awareness is slipping away. A sluggishness seeps in behind my eyes that is increasingly difficult to ward off. Intent disintegrates like an faded dream; purpose loses it’s conviction, reason it’s clarity; desire fades like the smoke of smouldering candle wicks. Somnolent, lazy--a weariness heavier than love, despair, anger or care. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Sleep like the contented doves.    

Twilight is the best time. The netherworld, when the intermingling of dim light and fractured time gives rise to a hazy, disjointed sensation. And the eye, though just barely perceptive enough to distinguish between shadow and object, cannot quite convince the brain to believe it. Twilight is the hour of faith. Like the pious monastic, we cannot discard all meaning, nor question the validity of what we know to be true. Though the eye mistrusts its own aptitude in this confounding ethereal light, faith will sustain us until the dark drives it off and, by losing it, we regain definition,  and the veil of tricks is lifted.

Only a few miles away, the sun plunges into the Pacific, and there it sinks by incremental degrees. I stare from my hill, as I often do, and notice that its spiteful grip on the bloody, kaleidoscopic sky is as lock-jawed as the steely bite of a snapping turtle, and in a matter of moments the whole expanse of unprotesting sky follows the sun, yanked into the gloomy grey depths of a turbulent ocean. At this sacrifice a breeze, slight and all the more intruding, ambles in from the western horizon and waggles the palms and bougainvillea; the withered leaves perk up noticeably, unfurling at the first touch of a softened air; and a soft cooing begins once more from the roost of the contented doves.    

Midnight is the best--the time of whispers and absolution. As darkness drives off the light before it, so, too, does the coolness of night smother the heat. The crickets chirp happily, loquacious, and the bugs and flying things crawl in the cool dirt or zip through the air. A bat swoops into a sliver of light, hunting for solitary specks on the backdrop of night’s dark hues. The quiet, at this hour, possesses a different roar from that of the gentle mornings or wicked noons. Broken only by the quarrelsome yelping of coyotes, this is a lover’s quiet, sweeping, suggestive, implied. You can almost hear the soft moans and rhythmic rocking behind the shuttered windows, behind the drawn curtains and blinds, which hide the curves and the flaws of naked flesh, which obscure what is known, what is accepted, what is shared and nurtured; which deaden the I-love-you’s and all the hopeless lies--though, for sure, they are told in truthful sincerity, born, as they are, in sweltering moments of rash passion on enclaves of mussy sheets and sofa pillows. You can nearly hear the whispers, but only feel the forgiveness, for it is repetitive and never spoken. 

And I sit under the umbrella, sheltered from a new, vast sky of stars and infinity and black, and pour a final whiskey while sensing around me the fusillades of incrimination and betrayal, disappointments, misunderstanding and loneliness. They sail through the night like grim-faced surfers caught in the curl, silent rancor, but grow dimmer and dimmer with each light put out, each dog fed, each TV abandoned, each book set aside.

A skunk is sniffing around at something interesting in a bush next door. He hears the clinking of ice against glass, looks up, notices my presence, sneers, gives a little flick of his tail and continues on, fearless. Another grave-yard shift worker; he, like the crickets, will miss the morning cooing of the contented doves. 

Author's Biography

*** Soon to come ***

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