Chiaroscuro

Shadow

There’s something about a day like this. It whispers to every sense, entering pore and soul. Winter is coming, it says. The light has fallen behind a season, the shadows cast are deep.

On the sidewalk, skin hung bones of desperate black and blue humanity - homeless, drug addicted, deformed - fold makeshift tent, umbrella and tarp homes, and move on; or they’re stuck, leaden from drug hangovers and starving pain, pain that rattles oblivious traffic with a sorrowful howl.  In the city’s streets of warehoused poverty, a virus’ kiss, a fentanyl overdose waits around brick corners in alleyways. Molten, wet leaves flutter to the ground, sweeping tears, vomit, feces, candy and Doritos wrappers into corner genie spirals.  But there is no magic here.  Animation is in the mind.

The billboard clatters in the empty parking lot as it flips between old advertisements for Pepsi and a now-abandoned restaurant. A few birds argue on a barbed wire fence, railroad cars are parked on the other side. Hoary clouds roll slowly under dark iron clouds, burying sky and mountain, like a kettle lid shutting.  I climb the wooden stairs, and step over a dead baby mouse, soaked from last night’s rain.  An alarm sounds. The space is deserted, dark.  I alone disarm the alarm, turn on lights, shut a window that ushered in the night’s cold. 

Light

Light breaks in as a flush of warmth, the seconds it takes to see within a frame.  On a  patch of oversized clovers, sunlight catches red and orange fall leaves buried in the thick weave; on a still, mirroring lake a beam finds a viridian tree and ultramarine sky meeting seamlessly;  a vignette encircles a long-necked, tiny-headed, russet-red mushroom;  a sunray cuts through clouds falling on cargo containers haphazardly layered creating a painting-perfect geometric color balance; yellow lamplight encircles her high-boned face, lids nearly shut, as she reads by a window.

Someone arrives in the adjacent office; his voice is mealy, vowels too round.  A photo text of my daughter’s eyebrows appears on my phone showing a raw spot where wax took away skin. A pre-fab house is hauled piggy back on a truck up the ramp in front of me.  A chalkboard black, tubular railroad car sits on the tracks, carrying something flammable.  It’s black is dusty, dabbled with rust.

The train moves on, opening a grey concrete canvas. An overweight woman in an orange reflector vest walks the tracks like a tired coyote.  A murder of diaphanous clouds pass over the patchwork, clear-cut mountain.  A van passes below my window after picking up beer from the brewery, yeasty odors bellow inside.

Reds push on my back, calling for my attention. In my imagination, the desert is plastered in flat, bold light.  A fox with giant ears sits on a human’s lap, the human stretching her hands out, reaching for stories like ribbons of color floating in and out of light.