Morning glory

This morning when I stumbled out of bed to get the girls ready for school, I thought something outside was on fire. I opened the bathroom door which faces east and the room was blazing in tangerine light. As I ran to open the front door for a look, Hayley called from the back. A perfect orb spanned our backyard, an expanded St. Louis arch in luminous technicolor. The four of us stood and traced its vivid rim, hues waxing and waning before suddenly dissolving back to infinite blue, as if it had been a mirage of our own making.



I recalled the lines I'd just read from Robert Cording's poem "Last Things", appearing in the fall Georgia Review:

But just as often I have been distracted

by dust on the windowsill dimpling with rain
or the yellow shine of afternoon sun

on the grass, by the rush and babble
of voices talking in the next room,

or even a dog's barking--as Augustine
may have been, looking up now and again

from his prayer, arrested by an ordinary cloud
passing across the face of the sun

and the new shadows pooling on the floor,
the next thing still happening, still arriving

and being replaced, still restless, all of it
part of a world so hard to finish loving.