I walk to work
The same hour each day
And make a time-lapse film
Frame by frame
To capture the passing year.
Buildings fall into vacant lots,
Rise from the rubble.
Storms flash overhead.
Cars blur past
Dreary commuters
Taking dreary steps
Toward dreary jobs.
But along the sidewalk,
Sweetgums grow
Tall, stately, serene,
Life in the grey and black canyons.
In winter, they sleep.
I walk wet pavement
Beneath dark, dripping skeletons.
With springtime sun,
Acid green buds
Burst open in an eyeblink
To shake new leaves
In the morning air.
My summer path leads
Beneath crinoline branches,
Silken leaves rustling,
Lazing in the light.
Autumn comes and the sun,
Tired out by long days,
Grows tardy.
The sweetgums sport fall fashions and,
For a few brief frames,
The sunrise and I,
Bleary-eyed,
Collars turned against the season’s chill,
Walk the streets together.
The sky is a purple shell.
The air is still.
The trees are dark,
Their branches garbed in orange and rust.
They do not rustle.
They do not shake.
They sizzle.
Deep within them, hidden by dying leaves,
A thousand starlings wake.
They greet the sunrise with
Gricks and whistles,
Creaks and pips.
I stand smiling
Beneath a thousand chittering mouths,
Listening to
The sound of butter in a hot skillet.
Sizzle. Pop. Hiss. Flutter. Zing.
A few more days,
A few more frames,
And the sun lags behind me.
The sweetgums now are silent,
Branches laden with sleeping birds.
Later still,
Once the trees drop their leafy frocks,
The starlings leave the city to winter’s cold,
And once more I walk alone
Beneath dark and bony boughs.
k
Seattle.
Nails clicking on the hardwoods, he pads toward my dawn-chilled room. I see his greyed muzzle poke around the open doorway, black nose wriggling. His old limbs are stiff, but he’s always been like that; he was never young. Churchill’s Black Dog was never a pup, never a young whelp filled with enthusiasm and love of life. He’s always been a grizzled, aged hound, waiting out his final days in lassitude and despair.
n time, he knew, his transgression would be forgiven (though not forgotten, for during their thirty tumultuous years, his wife had proven the tenacious nature of her memory when it came to remembered wrongs), but oh, in those first raw moments when his sleeping, animal mind awoke to action, its raging mouth spewing vowel-filled vomit and its sharp-clawed arms flailing the air with a strength that quite overwhelmed his usually reasonable demeanor, while his shrieking brain was infused by a single thought–Damn you!–and his only goal was to win, to beat down any who had the stupefying arrogance to question his authority, he was transformed by the heat of his frustration and anger from his normal self into a god–not the loving God of Creation, possessed of boundless serenity and knowledge, but one of the ancient gods, in whom everything human was magnified and every act saturated with earthly emotion–and though the rational part of his mind recoiled at the anguish he sculpted, his chiseled words striking her features with cold, steely precision, he could not suppress (and in truth, actually reveled in) the pounding exultation he felt as each tear tracked down her wizened cheek, a flood of salt water pressed from a frozen stone.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 