back turned

Too much time. I've been around and then down. Feels like I'm infected with the city. It's cold external windows my eyes. People roaming around on the inside, keeping busy, getting paid. They're touching computers. They're shuffling around me. It's hard to separate myself from this urban feeling. I can't relocate. Separation feels like fat rising to the top, skimming it off, discarding or saving for later. A yellow, vulnerable skin of cream. That's me imagining any sort of separation. Discard it, it's not possible. The clarity surrounding Seattle is such an odd taint upon the crowded in corners, the crosswalks and their beckoning flashes, the huddled up bus stop in the morning. First, stand at the bottom of a city hill. Darkness, no cover. I look out at the lake and the space needle. Watch traffic roar by on the highway with enough distance that it looks like it is all inching along. Like the suddenness of realizing the sun has risen without telling you. The bus startles me in the same way. My frantic scramble to leave the house means I have this gapped-tooth of a moment before I have to move onward. From the bottom of a city hill to the floor of a city. Floor of the city is soothing, I can feel it getting all wound up nice and tight. Clicks of a studded circle, slowly cranking toward release. Then dizzy dizzy crowds. Bus roars and steps, everywhere people and objects are crawling up and into each other; steps steps steps. Time to leave the city floor. The time when that happens should be indeterminate, the bus being so unpredictable. But I have a place to be, coffee to make, voicemail to hear. So I know to check my cellphone. I know to be disinterested but aware of the mumbling of my fellow bus waiters. The feeble dissent that always results in boarding another bus, moving along, forgetting the waiting because it'll just happen again, out of control for you or me todaytomorrow. Then I'm blazing out of the city and into the bubbled edge of city life. The outskirts that can call themselves community. Magnolia. Take a bridge, verify you aren't in seattle with that cityscape view. That neighboring titan of mountain rock that frames your life and erases it. I see all of that on my bridge into the bubble's edge. It's an edge because there's water, it's an edge because there's sky or woods or more mountain or less people or bigger cars. It's just an edge for me today, get it. Then I'm on the top of a hill, rolling downward to the Magnolia village, the land of the job. From on top I can see a line of mountains and a horizon of water, ocean, but like lakes for a droplet like me. The mountains stretch sideways, hover over the buildings, but just barely. It's almost that imagined Germanic quaintness, constantly dwarfed by the snow and the slopes, the peaks and the rustic architecture. For some seconds it really is almost all that. But as I move down that steep steep hill into Magnolia Village, into the neighborly heart of this curve of the bubble, the mountains disappear, and the houses on the hill closest to them overtake 'em, rise up and chase 'em down. I almost remember the poem I needed to write in my head this morning when I made this happen with my walking:

The houses pound down
on Mountains

Till they're down down
in their bellies.

The houses make my borders;

Light peeking through them,
Lines coming out

Forming shape out of houses and light.

The light is the empty shape, and
The houses are the world we'll make.