He stands.
Centered.
Above the Keystone.
On the Great Bridge.
The Dark City extant,
as far
as ever eye can see.
How far,
how far,
how far may that be?
He singsongs the thought -
silently -
inside his head.
But his mind cannot calculate
the distance the City spans
from the tiny,
reversed,
inverted image,
projected,
(through his eye darkly)
to the world inside his head.
He looks down upon the City
from the Bridges arcing span.
The streets below,
empty of any living thing,
provide no scale to hang -
a dimension on.
The structures stretching
into the faded distance
could be small as dollhouses,
or massive as mountains.
Gazing out across the City
from the height of the Great Bridge,
it is impossible to know.
The sky above
sunless -
cloudless -
ochre -
and emptier,
(were that possible),
than the City spread below.
The heavens glow
with a faded brown light.
"If the smog of LA were luminous,"
he thinks,
"this is how the world would be."
He stands.
Centered.
Above the Keystone
of the Great Bridge.
Hands rest palm down
on the cold cement railing.
He can feel it,
gritty under his fingers
when he smooths them
over the sandpaper surface.
Today it feels real.
Tomorrow?
The air is cool on his face.
He does not remember
when the Great Bridge
first appeared.
It plays no part in his earliest
remembrance.
Nor does he remember
when first the sky
began to glow.
On his earliest journeys,
it had always been night.
With neither Moon,
nor Stars,
in the coal dust black sky.
Nor had there been a City,
then.
The first time he entered
the Dark Land,
he remembered,
he had found himself,
standing alone,
upon a narrow road.
With no idea where he was
and no memory of how
he got there.
There had been no City,
then.
Only an empty desolation
of stones and dust,
which crawled
forever
away from him,
into infinite blackness.
He had been afraid then,
afraid of the darkness,
afraid because he could see,
in a world which contained no light.
and afraid because
he did not know
the way home.
No comments:
Post a Comment