1/23/11 Canyon of light, city morning
Beauty is something that has to be known, felt, honored, to be perceived. I don't often walk through the streets near my job thinking, oh this is beautiful, this is ecstatic (but maybe I should start to).
Yesterday, the sun was at the right angle to shine nearly horizontal through the clouds of exhaust on 4th street. Traffic backed up--trucks, cars, minivans with their taillights winking red in the dark hulks of their silhouettes. The buildings four and eight stories tall along the street, a skyway (walkway on the second floor) bisecting the rays down at Second Avenue. Figures in overcoats hurrying one way and another on the sidewalks--edges of this canyon of light. Grey-white street, part snow, part asphalt was the canyon's floor. And the curls and wisps and limbs of vapor rising from the cars idling at the traffic light--dreamsicle pink and peach in the sunlight, white-blue sky behind.