Wednesday, February 11, 2015

AFTER PARTING COMPANY WITH A GOOD FRIEND.




A street slopes downhill, an acute drop, forcing me to govern my stride. (Maybe this isn’t my town, after all.) The kind of second-story flats people wind up letting after they’ve suffered a few disappointments. Trees built of heavy stones, pale and papery skin molting. A moment before evening when sky and pavement equal water, when a bird and wire equal water. Everything singular, like the numbing aspect of a lamp’s worldly crown. I’d sat with a friend at a spot where every third table accommodated a plate for a diner—she and I the only pair. Silverware on poor china there, and there, as an orchestra built of the same instrument. What she’d been saying, my friend, her pattern of stress. (“Maybe this isn’t my town, after all.”) The electricity, on credit, that animates an entire grid. Assumptions of utility and wastefulness—the way some guidance plays to the empty theatre of a wide intersection. An illness weakens a handshake; an illness within a handshake; the handshake equals water. February will end in a while, I don’t know who I’ll be in March, maybe afraid.


4 comments:

hthr said...

This is that cold damp hike down the street thought familiar, Maryland Ave perhaps, where that same upended piece of sidewalk trips me up, every damn time. One might parallel park with precision but then spatial relations fail in the cold damp hike away from solemn admissions. Like electricity, resilience is always on credit. It takes two hands to make one handshake. The whole is greater than its parts.

DAN / DANIEL GUTSTEIN said...

The whole perseveres. I don't say this in jest, but it was a Russian Cosmonaut who got us all thinking that way. It might be Md. Avenue or it might be Columbia Rd. -- either way, the light staggers and the person blurs but the whole -- which is love -- perseveres. The Russian knew that, the whole time he drifted above the earth and we know it too here on earth. The one hand and the one hand clasp each other, a shake.

--------------------ba

mark wallace said...

Nice one!

DAN / DANIEL GUTSTEIN said...

thanks. your kind words much appreciated. ---b.a.g.