as i survey the wondrous cross-fire

It’s like our streets are puzzle pieces, not only in how they weave and intersect at odd, incongruous angles, but in how they piece together a history, a culture — a past, present and future drama that incorporates thousands of characters and millions of memories.

It’s like the connections are forming something and no one can see what it is.

It’s a birthplace, an airplane hangar, a night on the town, or a peaceful countryside, a scary monster, a tidy desk, a family portrait or discarded letter.

It’s the world, isn’t it?

When it rains the pieces are soggy, and we lost sight of how we fit together, sitting inside or under porches, heads down, umbrellas up, our hands in our pockets. Our cardboard lives get water-logged, because we haven’t yet been lacquered.

Pieces go missing.

People disappear. They move, they leave, they go to stay with a friend.They get arrested, they get shot, they die.

And things look a bit more askew than they had a moment before. We’d formed a connection that painted a little more sense to the streets in our city. We were the fingers, the leaves, the burst of color, the textural significance, a stray pencil, or plain, bright blue.

We held our connection by the chemistry-like bond of the bigger picture.

And then it crumbles. We are a fingernail, or a stem.

We are pieced together as the sphere becomes smaller and smaller. We know them and they know us and come to find out, he knows her and we know her, and we and he now stretch to fill the gap of those that went missing. Some semblance of whatever we’re making is attained. But we are infinitely aware, and broken-hearted, by the squarish bits of nothingness that dot our country road.

 

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