From depths of a blooming dull-red sky, February departs the city of men. How many lies are told in a city such as this! Yet among the thieves and cobblestones persists a strange, cold-grey peace--
Back when I believed in the solidity of windows I would press my small frame against the glass and peer out at the street and the lawn; or, in the backseat of our station wagon I would lie on my back and let the dull, cloudy, pre-dinner sky over Squirrel Hill sink into my soul with the smell of library books and linoleum seats. In those long days cars never hit one another and walls were solid (but I didn't know what bullets were, either, except the magical imaginary expulsions from the wooden noisemaker under my bed). In high school I read that the rare glass windows in centuries-old castles were thicker at the bottom on account of a nagging liquidity which, though fire-frozen into stillness, continued to flow. Thus ended childhood, and my belief in solid things, for nothing is solid in an absolute sense--nothing at all--neither peace and order, nor their counterparts: for chaos and violence also surrender to marvelous, inevitable fluidity.
Such is progress on our space-faring lava-bubble's life-laden crust; and such is my strange peace in the city of men. We often hear these things within our souls, but never speak them forth.
