Walk Seven - Billowing Silk and Golden Cloth
Another mural…
Broad Street’s secrets
are trapped in the mouth
of a woman wrapped in silk.
Fabric covers her mouth.
She is silenced, but
her eyes
are quite telling.
Silk billows around her face
in constant dips, ebbs, and flows.
She doesn’t look defeated,
despite her voice kept
by a line of gold…
Above her head
is a pale face
seeing through the hole
of a broken window.
His dull face is dry and blue
in the street lights.
His skin is the texture of a tombstone…
What is he seeing?
What was it that saw him?
On the same street,
a steady tree has several thick stems
that, in the fantasy of night,
resembles a person
with many arms,
wrapping itself in its own embrace.
It declares to reach out to me
and hold me
in acknowledgment of
support I may have missed,
without recognizing its absence;
so engrossed in the movement itself,
not noticing times or places
when one should have been held.
I walk by its number of arms.
I catch a snatch
of my face,
split into four different worlds.
A mirror built into architecture
lends me four pieces of myself.
The curves that split the entity
into a number of existences,
holds me in four different ways;
and this is good because
I feel like many different beings,
though, this evening
is still enough for me
to feel just one,
my observer…
Across the street,
a dog leaps over nothing.
His sense of adventure is undisturbed.
He uses his limbs
to remove himself from time.
While his walker has no idea
of what another kind of world
may be/feel like.
A wave of enchantment
rolls over my head
as a another brilliant tree
flashes its leaves above me.
I can almost hear a light, glistening sound;
the kind of sound you “hear”
when you see stars blinking in the sky.
Covered in darkness,
but revealed by the street lights,
and empty yard sits still
as the city speaks its night tears.
The yard’s emptiness is playful.
Across the street,
rows of pumpkins lay
on top of each other,
in front of the market,
like a pile of moving bodies
embodying the slowness
of the hour,
their skins rubbing against each other
like the easiest thing in the world.
No noise, they just move,
so used to feeling wrapped in
each other’s closeness,
that they can no longer feel each other,
for its been a while
since they felt anything else.
Crossing a large street,
I slow down to snap
a mental image
of the empty path
of the long road leading
to the yellow clock
that hovers in the distance;
rows of street lights
and cars line up
on both sides of the street.
It’s 11pm,
and Philadelphia is almost silent,
despite the friends who challenge
to stretch night into another day,
another life of its own,
and the couple sharing a bike.
She sits in front of him
on the seat
as he steers and petals.
He hovers over her in protection.
Their small world is all their own,
with no space in between them
for anything to slip into it.
Between them, there exists no void,
seemingly.
So small in this large city,
yet so large in the space they occupy.
On the bike,
they pause,
and then rip through night.