Across a Square R. G. Jodah
Nine flights up, above the sunrise on a sixties roof, a parapet skirts the edge, thigh high. You take a cold breath of the sleeping world exhale a cupful into your hands. Back to the tomb of a chipped paint air condenser, an ugly bouquet of satellite dishes, a little space and time to watch as dawn drags the day out of hiding. See what the black-shift sweepers have left. To the warming east, where the old road bleeds into the heart of this aching body, waiting on the scaffold the tarpaulin flaps like roosting bats. A sudden dislocation when the static of the open channel stops, drops you out into the cool quiet, where the sodium radiance rolls a thin sunset stain on brushed wet slabs. In the waiting, the sky dilutes to a white translucence, mother-of-pearl at this orphan hour, fading stars, his face on the bill-board washes out into yesterday. A yard below, colder than the street, six cylinders turn over into life and birds, just in from the country, take brief, indignant, flight. Flushed, settle down to a sullen slumber.
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