Guardian of Forever

Or,

For the 9th Street, 4th Avenue El

Toward the margins of the neighborhood,
In the lost spaces,
The old town that was bustling in the long ago decays and every block has become the places where corners bend into dead ends and some of the numbers are fractions…

Silvery quiet of four in the afternoon on a November Monday wraps me up like a fog,
My feet need not touch the ground,
I go left,
West, to be exact,
Along the sidewalk ringing the area under the trestle that has been marked off as a playground,
Playground,
Minefield of garbage to say the truth of it,
Frayed black wooden bats cling upside down to a rotten chain-link fence…

Hanging like a flag in the middle of the trestle block from one of the supports is a sign with fading red lettering in gunmetal gray,
Fifty years old if it’s a day,
It says, “First Machinery Corp.”
And it says this suspended over what was never a door,
Nowhere in sight is any trace of anything that could ever have remotely or possibly have been the “First Machinery Corp.” –
So where did the company go?

Silly question,
It’s gone,
The sign remains,
Always having been in the wrong place,
The sign remains,
Commemorating nothing,
Opening a door to the past…

Many such journeys are possible,
None of which will make any more sense than this one did in the end.

End. Rev4. 10 February 2010, 6.36 pm, Brooklyn

© David Mark Speer