Surrounding an array

Surrounding an array of lit windows, stacked two high and two abreast, a reddish wall, possibly of a less fiery hue but aroused into rufosity by the orange glow of the streetlamp. The wall stretched out in uniform illumination. Streetsides at night have more purity of light than the day. It is with uniformity that you greet the spaces that cannot welcome you. Although the red is punctuated by bursts into homes, that gape glazed with a dull passion you can not share. Out of these eyes the red wall is no more than another barrier, but its shade carries the mirage of invitation and passage. Perhaps charitability of the windows lighting now all alive is to her a loving statement of presence. In the night, which itself has a palpability across which even the tender, unseen heat from a teakettle, or arrangement of a fork on a folded red check’d napkin could, in its existence in the same powder, wrap a fiery tingle in the base of her neck where acceptance and acquiescence are sensed. I give to each of these windows, each with its own symbolic variant on the tone of its home, ruddy, brick’d, rust, burnt, a memory or a manufactured history; I give each a potential because I sense love therein. The love found in a place setting or a door ajar with a light showing out from the jamb, or turned down bedclothes on a pallet. Behind a gingham curtain, a rose-covered drape, and a rubescent translucent veil, all lit from within, are scenes and backdrops for plays of potential passion. Her eyes squint as her nostrils dilate and draw in night air. I can breathe in the moistened lateritious sediment of the lighted night that floats between my self and the wall. Each particle contains the spark of a situation, the beck of the empty home covered with inviting openings.

The light falls on a pale wall bathed in aureate benevolence. In an apartment home, blond wood floors are sealed with ancient shellac. The floors creep throughout each room and out of sight. The grain of the wood is indistinct and hazy, blurred and refracted through the thick carapace of yellowing resin. The finish is damaged by prolonged exposure to sunlight. Idleness and neglect have left my skin laying out in the day drying, gathering a fine coat of dust that when grazed or rubbed scuffs the fine outer layers until they are worn down to tanned, leathery flakes. The jaundiced skin runs up the walls. The sky shows through a deep orange around the walls of the box. These stage flats pried open slightly. The walls, floor, and roof invert and refocus continually so that once I am within and contained I am at once spread out beneath the continuous night sky dome, draping down all about me and in the distance, across four fields of dew stippled lawn on my four sides, stand four walls. The treasonous home which has in sight of my cagey suffering beneath glass in a rolling vitrine, has enveloped me in the topology of the window and the wall and spat me out in a phlegmatic glob against the sky. Awake, in a vestibule or alcove, stopped, bug repellant light fixtures are clotted with webs and wings. Slumped against stucco which is to bear witness for my apostasy beneath the nightsky again, and beneath the dome light in the auto.


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