Across lawns
Across lawns and framed by twin palm trunks and running across the night a long low apartment block, covered in grey stucco, stands dimly at the darkened end of the route. Somewhere else the roads continue, maybe beneath me, maybe over a high plain, maybe in the violet shadows I toe into. When the road ends in the city it is with sorrow. Here stands the terminal ash to be shaken off into the night. The edges of lukewarm things, when half in shadow, half inviting, although so continuous and impermeable, are crisp and glistening in twilight. The sweat that cools on its surface becomes a finer sheen with the settling and redistribution of the beadlets. That slickness lines her hairless arm. Her arm is parallel to the window horizon, slightly above it because her hand grasps the top of the seat. Her lips rest against her forearm, dampened. Her eyes are fixed low, where the building meets the lawn. There is a border of dirt around the base but no plants, no coverage. The wall stands immaculately illuminated in absent moonlight that clears the surface of all texture and grain. At the end of the route, to my left, a shear grey face looms. I face it directly and its edges and solidity slip away behind the night into the violet space behind nocturnal things. As a single lit face presiding over a dim lawn, I see the profile of the block invert and recede. With shadowless and flat faces it is possible to see, in the benign lack of depth, a hollow, a shelter half mourning its incompleteness. Textures and value minutiae allude to this shape as not even the enclosure of a space but an aperture in the night, behind which lies a vast griseous demesne. With the same wan posture, the shape looms toward me with so many other protracted intrusions that the night spueth out. The shape is borne atop the stretch of my arm, a shimmering horizon crowned by a dull jewel. Slowly a face in shade folds out from the east as I move further, my feet now full depth into the night. I look upon the neutral mass to throw back repentance from my carriage. It does not gesture, cringe, or shrug under the received tribulations of an entire citys night. Seeming to always remain in pale balance, almost with rosy undertones, as I glaze upon it the sorrows of and the blame for its barren perimeter. Where shall the lights not cast out onto the lawns; where shall I lay at the frays of the violet unknowns?