Monday, September 24, 2012

Skateboards of the Apocalypse

This column means not to imply that the Flaneur approves of this sort of thing.

A roaring crescendo Friday morning at approximately ten:twenty in the morning.
It sounded like a skateboard approaching behind you in raw existential threat.
It was coming through the floor the walls the air the subsonic viscera.

To the window I went unprepared.
There over central Berkeley at what seemed a meager altitude,
flew the leviathan of a 747 with the space shuttle strapped on its back.
A slender black jet flew just behind it in the wispy-clouded sky.

Others who knew in advance gathered on hilltops and piers.
Yet none of these were startled in delight more than I
caught as I was unprepared.

Five seconds and it was outside my field of vision.
I thought I could see dollar signs raining down as it went
and global warming waving in its wake.

My mind accepted this outlandish sight on a conditional level,
the way one accommodates watching special effects films
that create similar spectacles in similarly familiar skies.
That is, one watches "actuality" with a certain suspension of doubt.

Had I expected it I might have been on my roof to see it go by.
But then I would have lost the exhilaration of an all too rare intrusion of surprise.

All the day long leaves of diaphanous cloud prevailed above.
These were intersected by the vapor trails of conspiracy.
A new looking jumbo jet flew over us with curious lucidity.
"Something's going on today," said a black lady with a dachshund in a park.

It was in fact the first of Fall, subtle colors in the trees,
with an autumnal shiver of the inevitability of challenge and change.



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