Signs of the Night

Tonight's walk:

Last summer's swimming pool, alabaster, empty, silent, bathed in light. Not one echo of August's rowdy, tense crowd simmering in a cauldron of raw longing, restlessness, and a dash of suspicion. Black elongated crosses demarcate depths and diving areas at the far end. A black wrought-iron fence guards the perimeter of the pool. The empty pool strikes a monumental pose. It looks like some kind of shrine with its radiance and stillness. A shrine to what? Snowflakes aimlessly fly about in the brisk wind. What if the pool were a sacred shrine, a local Taj Mahal? What if someone proclaimed The Burnet Park Pool as a tourist venue, designed by, say, Frank Gehry or Frank Lloyd Wright? Just saying so, people would think about it differently. But I don't need such proclamations. It is luminous and miraculous, just as it is.

Walking back home, the "clean, well-lighted place" (Hemingway's phrase) behind me, I see graffiti on a small concrete-block building housing electrical equipment. (Ever since my trips to Berlin, Germany, I'm more open-minded about graffiti.) The tag is:


L I F E


in urban blocky font, in black spray paint.

The "i" is not dotted.

Where the dot on the "i" would be, is a small x.

Which makes me wonder, yet again.