There has, however, been an abundance of sunlight, so I went out to absorb a full dose of it during its final hour. Though the air has remained cool, the day was sufficiently mild and bright to coax partly open the small purple flowers of the sourgrass. They closed again as I stood watching the varied fractal forms of cirrus clouds drift eastward. A few dozen of those tiny flying insects who like to gather above the bush near the porch were out, too. In their vertical dance, rising higher, then lower, individuals falling off to one side or the other, vanishing into the bush, then returning, the whole group endlessly bouncing and circling in some intricate series of patterns, they remind me of a bubbling fountain. Silhouetted against the evening sky, they give the appearance of being somehow compelled to trace the design of something that isn't there, and I briefly fancy them to be a cult of insects who worship water and attempt to invoke it through a modeling ritual. But they are like the clouds, and the trees, and my own eye perceiving them, manifestations of some mathematical formula working itself out to an unseen end, or maybe no end at all.
I look at the window now, and gray dusk has fallen, and the set sun has brought no color but a faint golden glow to the western sky. The birds have ceased to chirp, and the stream sent running down the road verge by a lawn sprinkler up the block shines with the reflected last light of the sky. Dimly, I see the insect fountain still bubbling above the bush.
