November 18, 2005
Quite a few things
One is a red glass chandelier
I saw in a shop window
a few mornings ago
It captured my fancy
but I haven’t noticed it again
since they put mannequins and cloths in front of it
But it has remained in my mind
Two is the flatness of the fronts of buildings
A statement that
at first seems both
ridiculously obvious
and patently untrue
the fronts of buildings aren’t flat
they’re full of porches and bay windows
and fire escapes and architectural ornamentation and stuff
And that’s what I usually mostly look at
but if you take the thing as a whole
it’s a great big box
with a really relatively flat face abutting the sidewalk
And then you get a whole row of them lined up at various heights
like building blocks
or the face of a cliff
big and flat
a solid block
a mass
a wall
Your eye can slip down the street
across the surface of one to the next like chunks of granite
Three is how those same buildings soak up the light
and change colors in the morning
and the afternoon
making them all the more like stones
Yesterday in the late afternoon when I went to get coffee
the edges of everything
but particularly the buildings
were so crisp and so lit up
almost as if from within
With the sun down below your sightline
it's more like they're glowing than being shined upon
Four was later that night when I left work
I’d stayed late and it was dark
And the sky was absolutely black
like the void of space it is
like velvet
You could almost see the depth and the nap of the blackness
With just two faint stars like tiny holes in those heavy backstage curtains
And this is what we
in the city
live under all the time
Not stars
just blackness as deep as a well
image source is here
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