Cityscapes by jkd

After the last stanza of Beverley Bie Brahic's, The Giant Sequoia...

O love in the ruins, o return to floodlights, oilslicks, gated building complexes with peeling paint, their cracked windows long to look as far as scattering birds in the snow of a distant province, the herding of cattle, sheep, goats, the song of wind in poplars tall as small, roundbacked mountains. Here, no moonglow in the safety-lights on the floor of the linoleum-slick structures, glass-shine flat-angled, flat-lined as a heart terminating to guide evacuated corridors towards their nearest emergency exit. O as in an ode, as in the odd misspent tones, hearing the distant song of consciousness in a lung’s cooling, fading, puffing the body into, through breezes along roadways, intersections, blinking stoplights. Building of mirrors glassfronted stores echo. The solitude of the city arcs, tides of waste processing, crest of the self selfless in the mirage of being whole in the urban grey erasure. O to own, o to one without form and void. O to awe and the awestruck arrivals like encounters with numbers from the brochure of jumbled images once dreamt, redemption or a ticket to fulfilment creeping among the masses. Recollections: country of youth, its silent forest. Now, what is run through by a snaking interstate, what is the clank of cutlery in the all-night truck stop, what is the blocked sequence of cityscapes becoming the promised land. O to luring the next batch forward. O to a being, its profound depths, not unlike noise leaking from the overhead bins.