meditation on the corner

i knew her face once joyous but now she’s dyed her hair so falsely blonde that she appears strangely somber. a custard yellow car queues behind a truck not ogre but ochre. behind the custard yellow car waits a house of the same color. confronted by a wall of aquamarine, doodled faces make no sense to me, flanked as i am by a steaming dragon of silver machinery. parked up the street a decrepit powder blue ice cream truck is mocked by its own miniature wheels. it must be hard to grow old when you’re that shade of blue. dim gray muscular male bulldog waddles across the street and squats to scratch before he reaches the other side of twelfth. above me, a toy train laps the room on popsicle stick tracks, while we are negotiating he says, are we she says, and her tunes shiver behind her. outside, an enormous arm that has fallen asleep in the middle of its dramatic gesture, poses for a painting of pointing, as if it took that long to herd one’s attention to that spot or to turn toward that precise angle of insight, exactly there. eventually your life will be heavy enough to turn with the tragic majesty of a doomed ship, because it takes some force to turn around in the cold deep water you now find yourself in, because it takes some force to counter the momentum of all those accumulated choices and the current that already wields you is very strong. a plant is wilting in its pot at the intersection of wide glass, defeated perhaps by the cool overcast, drowned for sure in the moistureless light of ash. and my eyes are smeared with it. across the street there is a dirty yellow recycling bin that looks somehow lonely, sullen like a mouth, waiting for a bottle or a can on that dead tongue of chalk. there are people i know with whom i do not crack wise about death, as if it were more immediate for them, a fresher wound, just recently plated, and still warm on their table, because they have been reacquainted with how suddenly any of us could be taken, stolen from story, and that for them is not merely a plot device. and then a seriously studious young woman walks in wearing the word love, which is spelled along her black sweater’s sleeve. staring out the window, i wonder if the people who live on the corner ever feel nervous about all that's swung above them?