magentas
There's this scrawny plant that exists or, more accurately, persists on a patch of dirt by a playing field's 7-foot wall along the sidewalk from the north edge of the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology high school across Bay Street; which, because of the puny and parsimonious nature of the stony soil (usually littered as it is with bits of human detritus and unpicked clods of canid poop) on which it lives does not appear healthy. When it grows to around (my) shoulder height it droops sadly over said sidewalk such that pedestrians have to walk around it, or brush indelicately past it, perhaps bruising the stems with their indifference. Next to it is nothing but that harsh and inhospitable ground.
So imagine my baffled surprise when, late this summer the creature started blooming. At first, its blossoms (which reminded me of a kind of misshapen, imitated, hibiscus) looked pale and wan, its countenance a sickly washed-out pink in the broad daylight, barely deserving one's pity-laced glance. So, walking past it that one morning's sunrise in the direction down Bay towards the east, I happened to stoop and look through the bloomy growth, my eye having been caught by the angular rays of sunshine streaming down from the general direction of My. Diablo in the far and imagined distance.
And, lo and unceremoniously to behold, the flowers' heretofore nondescript color had somehow miraculously transmogrified into this fantastic swirly magenta, one visually and nostalgically redolent of my Maui tropics, acquiring a glammed-up hue that was both translucent and opaque at one and the same moment and so, finally, reminding me that I have always loved the acutely slanted lightrays of early morning and gathering dusk, transforming as they do things into the dense and color-saturated objects they truly are.
[ NB: There are two magentas implied by the title of this post - the somewhat alarming prose of these paragraphs, and these alienly burning fields of flower-petal below: ]
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