sundown lights

the ending of a day - a summer’s day. long and warm and broken in the early evening by a soft breeze that shook the leaves of the trees so the air was filled with their rustlings.
the small birds that show up in the early evening to catch the mosquitoes and other small flying insects flew past in long arcs, twittering excitedly . . . and all the while, the sky enfolded the day in a gentle cloudscape that i couldn't take my eyes away from . . .
to accompany this evening enfolding, here’s walt whitman writing in his collection specimen days back in 1892.

sundown lights
  
“this is the hour for strange effects in light and shade — enough to make a colourist go delirious—long spokes of molten silver sent horizontally through the trees (now in their brightest tenderest green,) each leaf and branch of endless foliage a lit-up miracle, then lying all prone on the youthful - ripe, interminable grass, and giving the blades not only aggregate but individual splendour, in ways unknown to any other hour. i have particular spots where i get these effects in their perfection. one broad splash lies on the water, with many a rippling twinkle, offset by the rapidly deepening black-green murky - transparent shadows behind, and at intervals all along the banks. these, with great shafts of horizontal fire thrown among the trees and along the grass as the sun lowers, give effects more and more peculiar, more and more superb, unearthly, rich and dazzling.”