whatiwas

i saw it again walking over the Burnside Bridge, rain cutting my face with needlethin drops that gathered in my hair and slowly crept downward, the water so cold it felt like a slight burn as the wind chapped my skin on the open road. the muddy Willamette beneath me looked still in parts, rippled and timeless, as the city loomed above it with its lights tickling the water and spiraling infinitely inward, rising not to a point but, rather, to a crest. suddenly, through glasses compromised by a fresco of rounded distortions of light in its purest form, the cyclical face of the world opened up in one warm, enormous eye, watching me admiring it from afar and said nothing, just stared back at me as i imagined the lights and glass and metal and concrete as a portrait of the ocean miles away, that the still-life sculpture built upon the backs of dead things thousands of years old was just humanity's way of paying tribute to the lover it could not ever conquer and that it could only begin to understand with every swell and crash at each place where the shattering tears of land go to be carried into a different kind of forever.