Your great white corpse flensed by the sun's spade, tried by the southern wind, your oil running thick in the scuppers of the street: you are dwindling before our eyes.
You're no longer burdening the bushes but lurking beneath them, fugitive. I look down on your drifts, not up to them. Markings high on the street poles and out into the sidewalks lines show your former reach. Heaps are fissured into peninsulas, eroded into tombolos, isolating into islands, reduced finally to patches of dampness.You are reduced to smutty bolsters perched on glaucous rafts of ice along the curb. Pebbles perch on the eroding pinnacles of granular, crunchy ice. Sand and grit congregate more and more closely as the snow matrix on which they were scattered disappears, as indeed the galaxies will when the space of the universe collapses.
You're volatilizing, ablating, etherealizing almost visibly before my eyes as I run. I dodge streams of water gushing from under you across the sidewalk, dodge showers of water fall splashing from bridges. Pools of water appear to block my path. Glistening granules of snow, glistering runnels of water. Along the verges and around the trees, strips and rings of dead, sodden grass are expanding. If, to steady myself, I thrust my hand into you, you feel warm and crumbly. If I step into you, I sink to the wet slush at the bottom.
In the playground as I pass, masses of exuberant children race frantically from toy to toy, shouting names and instructions, trampling your pristine whiteness into a slurry.
You're not longer impressive, except as mountains in the snow farms or massive ice blocks washed up on the Cape, but even in decay, you're interesting as you re-inhabit the sky, getting ready for new presentations. You've been such a major factor in all our calculations that your absence seems like a new life. Perhaps it is.
You're no longer burdening the bushes but lurking beneath them, fugitive. I look down on your drifts, not up to them. Markings high on the street poles and out into the sidewalks lines show your former reach. Heaps are fissured into peninsulas, eroded into tombolos, isolating into islands, reduced finally to patches of dampness.You are reduced to smutty bolsters perched on glaucous rafts of ice along the curb. Pebbles perch on the eroding pinnacles of granular, crunchy ice. Sand and grit congregate more and more closely as the snow matrix on which they were scattered disappears, as indeed the galaxies will when the space of the universe collapses.
You're volatilizing, ablating, etherealizing almost visibly before my eyes as I run. I dodge streams of water gushing from under you across the sidewalk, dodge showers of water fall splashing from bridges. Pools of water appear to block my path. Glistening granules of snow, glistering runnels of water. Along the verges and around the trees, strips and rings of dead, sodden grass are expanding. If, to steady myself, I thrust my hand into you, you feel warm and crumbly. If I step into you, I sink to the wet slush at the bottom.
In the playground as I pass, masses of exuberant children race frantically from toy to toy, shouting names and instructions, trampling your pristine whiteness into a slurry.
You're not longer impressive, except as mountains in the snow farms or massive ice blocks washed up on the Cape, but even in decay, you're interesting as you re-inhabit the sky, getting ready for new presentations. You've been such a major factor in all our calculations that your absence seems like a new life. Perhaps it is.
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