The sky beneath the Sky

Leaving the village whose periphery was marked by the march of beech trees and the lusty chuckle of the river as it tumbled over the weir, he crossed the hidden bridge and felt the spring sky open up as he entered the mosaic of farmland that gathered on the margin of this quiet civilisation. Here the fields were assembled like a footsore rank of guardsmen, dusty with the rigours of the harvest, the untrammelled chaos of emerald vines where peas grew; shadowed by a sea of tobacco plants, their broad leaves aching for the touch of the sun. Beyond this the sunflowers laty in their disciplined ranks, their unformed flowerheads rising like the spears of infantrymen, and then a a respite where the expired crop revealed the rubble of stem and soil, still deep with the caress of melted snow.

So he walked on, following the gravelled path, awash with ice chips of limestone and unruly fetters of grass, as it passed each plot, like walking on the surface of a leadlight window in a chapel. Each field sang it’s attributes proudly to the cerulean stage, their jumble of shape and angle. Twice he came to a place where the path was upturned into a frozen set of muddy waves, where the water pooled between the crests, and was obliged to break his steady serene pace to skitter his way in fits and starts across these lakes where the tears of the sky mingled with the rich earth. Soon after he came upon a well-metalled road that led straight and fast to the woods on the hills, and said farewell to the final sea of wheat, with all its tiny motions and little whisperings, and entered the woods and found the sky beneath the sky.

Here the pines stood tall, like columns in a great cathedral, clothed in shards of viridian that pecked at the azure proscenium, dividing it into fragments that served only to amplify its power. Beneath his feet the path echoed this paring in the motile shadows upon the pebble strewn path that tumbled uneasily over great roots and veins of stone, winding in long exhalations upwards, as he passed from the relief of shade and shadow into the work callused caress again of Helios, to feel it’s life flow into his skin, until the heat became almost overwhelming and he dove for each new moment of relief with fervour and gratitude.

Looking upwards he beheld the subtle dance of the canopy, each stem like a brush loaded with colour to renew the sharp pang of each impossibly bright cloud, as the murmurous song of the wind that passed overhead like a gossiping aunt came to his ears like a chorale in a language he could not speak, yet brought heart’s ease nonetheless. Somewhere nearby he heard the counterpoint notes of a tiny brook as it chucked and gurgled on its happy errand, and in the moment following the wind replied with a merry laugh that set the trees to a gentle cacophony of rustles and hums, and then subsided to that most measured and sacred of tones, the Voice of the sky beneath the Sky.