There was a sidewalk in Houston I had recently come to enjoy: spray-painted with enigmatic poetry. Running my eyes over its cracked and buckling surfaces I was reminded of a sidewalk from my childhood. The sidewalk ran from Gammy and Gampy's front porch steps beside a small anonymous tree which memorably bore pomegranates one summer in the prism of my memory toward a squat gnarled oak whose growing roots had pulverized the orderly sequence of squares over time into an uncountable number of pieces. I was reminded of me trying to count them. After all these years, I am still staring at sidewalks.
My eyes go there automatically. Over the years I have discovered untold visual treasures – dozens of cicadas dead and dying, elegant knobs of soil-starved grass, serenely reposed dragonfly carcasses, wistful tableaux of fallen oleander petals, the skull of a fallen bluejay.
So I'm walking on this sidewalk in Houston one day a few months ago, staring at it like I tend to do, and in this view-space I discover that someone has decided to paint poems. Well, poem-like things at any rate: large carefully-stenciled-then-spray-painted-in-red-and-black-and-white words. My favorite square was written in red. It said:
My eyes go there automatically. Over the years I have discovered untold visual treasures – dozens of cicadas dead and dying, elegant knobs of soil-starved grass, serenely reposed dragonfly carcasses, wistful tableaux of fallen oleander petals, the skull of a fallen bluejay.
So I'm walking on this sidewalk in Houston one day a few months ago, staring at it like I tend to do, and in this view-space I discover that someone has decided to paint poems. Well, poem-like things at any rate: large carefully-stenciled-then-spray-painted-in-red-and-black-and-white words. My favorite square was written in red. It said:
motion motion motion motion
motion motion motion motion
motion motion motion motion
motion motion motion motion
The way the motionless words moved on the concrete moved me. And the concrete buckling beneath it. I happened upon it today as it was being sledge-hammered into pieces. The merrily-this-way-forward-up-and-turned-a-crooked-stile.