Thursday, September 16, 2010

Musing. Fall makes me do that.

I had to run an errand to another part of campus. As I walked  out of the building, I was confronted with a tent poster sale, and I was thrust back over twenty years, to purchasing large-scale images of The Cure and reproductions of Maxfield Parrish prints for the thickly-painted, fleshy beige of my dorm room walls.

I walk across the bridge from which poet John Berryman jumped, and I think about tossing a flower down onto the ice on January 7.

On this errand, I was reminded of the brash beauty of a completely cloudless autumn sky, that people still smoke, and that the incoming class of freshmen could be my kids. On the way back, I watched a crane loading up pieces of the bridge that fell. They have been languishing for three years next to the river. Maybe it's because the law suit has been settled; maybe it's because it's harvest time and someone needs the steel. In any case, it will be nice to reclaim that stretch of riverbank from the ghosts of failed engineering.

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