The Orange Crane

Its neck reaches into the foggy San Diego morning, stoic and stationary. I can see it from my window if I lean in and press my cheek against the glass. Its outline is unexpected in the landscape, the brightness of its coloring obscurred by the dawn and the low-hanging clouds that signal the onset of fall. Others slow to look while passing but I barely notice them. Instead I wonder if this migration will be in time. The rainy season is about to start. The crane sits comfortably beneath the hill that has been cleaned but still bears the pock marks of its former illness. The earth still spitting up onto the road, though less now that the bulldozers cut away the most offensive damage. The trees are still upturned, the veins of the incline exposed and rotting, syphoned off with tubes and piping like a terribly ill victim of some horrible accident. I strain to see the top of the crane, wondering when it will spring into action, fly along the devastated land and put right was has been wronged. But it does not move. It remains still in the early morning hours and waits. The dew is growing thicker.