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
there used to be half of an old car from the 1950s
projecting from the side of one of these buildings
over a parking lot covered in wild, hungry vines
creeping over and slowly consuming a whole host
of mysterious objects of unimaginable provenance
like a safari park for plants and large scale antiques
while the building was home to a busy tattoo parlor
at least, that was what it seemed like as I walked by,
fascinated as ever by the way this bygone boom town
can take on iteration after mutable iteration and still,
eke along as it may, stay busted and never booming
and so, given the Panic of 1893’s impact on Basic City,
a failed wheat crop in far away Argentina sowed seeds
that have been reaped here every year for 128 of them
thus long predating the most recent demonstration
of what a small world we have made for ourselves
How the West Was Lost Read More »
