March 2022

my grandfathers were born five years after the Panic of ’93
this town’s failure to thrive still serves as a reminder
of the lasting impact such an event can have

my parents were born in the moment
between The Great Depression
and World War II

gazing at this image and doing the math
I know I am a reminder of The Great Depression
being ushered out with sugar rations and blackout curtains
and I wonder if I am a reminder of the Panic of ’93

one thing leads to another
and time is a river
and what is it about this town
to me a strange attractor from the past
still haunting the present
and is there a strange attractor
in the future that is keeping it alive
these buildings still standing even when
they seem to signify only misery
to those who live nearby

reminders of
what was at once
the right side of the tracks
and on the wrong side of history

what will remind us
of these times in between
and those times long gone before
when these old buildings become home
to the coffee shops and rooftop bars
made to cater to the hipsters
of the biotech boom?

with bright yellow beams on the horizon
like a well-structured northern sunrise
gunmetal blue greyscale on the walls
nearly continuous with the clouds
trees mingling with telephone poles
like deer grazing in a field full of cows
the characters populating this street seem
to be settling back into the life of the world
from which they once arose, and upon which
they now constitute a thin and tenuous veneer

geometry tops
Skybound and rooted in Earth
children of them both

their geometry is pure
not the built world’s abstraction

buildings made by men
chasing ideals, are only
approximations

time and weather together
return them to the concrete

neither day-glo
nor blaze orange
the color of embers
warming a cold street
even while boarded up
I wonder what was GOOD
enough to be greyed out
redacted with a can
and what was
this place
before
it closed?
for a street
that’s grey even
when the sun is out
and the flowers bloom
this is welcome color

before the troubles
things were looking up, it seemed
and perhaps they were

time takes its toll on paint
as it does on what is painted
when is a piece of plywood
no longer a piece of plywood?
a building no longer a building?
what is death to the inanimate?
what is inanimate?

death to a living thing
is not so straightforward
as an ego might sense
as cells outlive organisms
and even when those cells die
their vitality lives on in other forms
as the nutrients which sustained them
become the nutrients which sustain others
and death turns out to be something more like
a change in form or a change in allegiance
or a change in hierarchical structure
or a change in the locus of control

where lies the allegiance of the vitality
that is continuous through the transition
from life to death to life across species
if not to life itself, if not to the biosphere?
is there a difference between the two?

this drab blue and clean white
match the grey of this sky
and seem to soothe me
though they may
have been applied
by an unsteady hand

a patchwork of paint in grayscale
plenty of plywood protecting the panes
I wonder when there was last a business
that opened this door and these windows
and carried commodities conducive to
conducting commerce on Commerce Ave.

from the level crossing looking north
to the Iron Cross, where the C&O line
crossed the N&W, until they became
CSX and NorfolkSouthern, shuffled
like the rest in the tumultuous
history of railroad reorganization

with the old lines, themselves already
amalgamations of smaller lines before,
went station after station, two of which,
had they survived, could be seen here