Action: let go of keys
Immediately followed by: sound of keys on flagstone
Picture: splayed out keys beside still right root
Realization: hole in pocket
Remembrance: there was a hole in this pocket.
Quietly exclamatory iamb or spondee: “That’s right.”
Suddenly the sky, like we’ve not seen before, is everywhere and expansive, yet answered and subdued by the thundering road, even with the traffic light. Horizon cut. (underpass at left below with woods.) pride and laughter Dedicatory placard. Chain fence and guard rails (we laugh out of denial, out of refusal, goodbye you are ridiculous) guardrails and sidewalks on each side of the purely functional unadorned hulking bridge, which has a bird’s nest in one of its street lamp’s casement openings. Over the moat of where I was as at each moment I am
To the left, far off, the building he saw grow gradually up, become skeletal then whole, and there, too, nearer the bridge over which that four lane county road passes, parallel again. What did he say was the problem with ambition? The problem with ambition, he had said, was that it “ran counter to one’s self-disappearance” that doesn’t sound like a problem, “is a sturdy embrace of materialism, a cultivation of the soul as a mere sense impression” –yes but that doesn’t sound– “–interrupts that process of decoction, you see, which one feels true writing is, or will one day be, to reach briefly but with chemical surety and explosiveness one’s true self.” The problem with ambition (but “was getting a haircut now and then so at odds with compassion? was wearing a collared shirt?”) let others have and win and surfeited with my loss and absence I will truly be something I will not be that shadow I thought to attain unto and
(No: it isn’t much of a bridge. What makes a bridge much is the gap it crosses over or the points it crosses between.) Pass below the one “beautiful” or natural area (found to be so) that irregular triangle between the off-ramp and the 10 lane highway, irregularly mowed (whitman like nature, van gogh like wheat.) (When they had rebuilt a nearby retaining wall they had turned this area into a parking lot for their bobcats, for their cement trucks, for their dumpsters and pickups, but a year or two later and this beloved triangle, whose legs are roads, whose waist and belt are also roads, is now how it was again, overgrown, neglected.)
Street left at end of bridge. (Decision to take most direct route, stepping off sidewalk, rather than following sidewalk a few extra feet toward ramp.) (Remark: I should make a catalogue of such shortcuts that posterity may know.) That street turns into a cul de sac where there is a realty business. Boxed flower beds are owned by County: fresh food grown for hunger program. (To say that the community on one side of the bridge is a mirror image of the community of the other side of the bridge, just as the two sides of the street on both sides of the bridge are mirror images of each other, is roughly so, I want to say, but actually at just this point is one of the pockets of difference between them, an irregularity in the glass as it were, because of the small commercial building with its small parking lot after the turn off-here, abutting the County’s vegetable beds, which formerly hosted an HVAC repair place and firestation 107, though both having been decommissioned in recent years, the latter the first of two firehouses I’m to pass.)
[STUDY OF SOUNDS]
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 