Morning on St Nicholas

Glance left, out the window, and it's dark out. Not truly black, because we're in the city. There's a low ceiling on the darkness, literally and figuratively. It can only ever get as dark as the scattered network of street lamps and streetlights, headlights and glowing office bulidings permit. Sometimes the ceiling is invisible -- we are simply cosseted within the glow, the boundary of the city's sphere somewhere up beyond. Today, though, the ceiling is described clearly as the murky underbelly of clouds. They stretch infinitely above us, a wrinkled lid like a crust. The building opposite is dark, but the darkest is what's inside it. Three apartments have lights on. I should say, three apartments have enough light on that I suppose it's on purpose. Nearly every apartment shows the odd flicker or glow of some LED status light. There are a few truly dark apartments, though. True darkness must always be relative -- the darkest spot in an image gives one end of a spectrum. Out my window, these darkened apartments are the only places where I can't imagine what a shadow would look like.

Glance left, out the window, and it's gloaming. At least I think it is. Glance right, back to the blazing white of Google.com's search page. "Gloaming". My bacon is saved by the gerund; I thought for sure I was using a verb. Out the window, a few more apartments have overhead lights on, but the effect is less striking than before, at least from where I sit. Before, those were the flickering lighters held aloft by a sentimental audience. They were hopeful, carrying something weakly remeniscent of human endeavor against encroaching darkness. Now they were vanishing. The stadium lights were coming up. Holding a lighter up seems a bit silly.

Now sound starts to edge out light, and the clanging of a city's activity tells my own sentamentalizing impulse to get lost. Lighters and gloaming can't hang with ejaculations of, what, a jackhammer? A SAWZALL? A ratcheting bolt-spinning machine? We're definitely not past dawn, so I can't figure it's a jackhammer. I don't know that it would be any louder or softer than the sound that I hear taking turns with the chiming of crudely handled metal tubing. I just can't imagine a foreman saying "It's about six and also let's get started with the jackhammer." The 'A's in that word are too tall not to notice it's a loud think you're talking about doing. Thank god for the little bird that pauses on the fire escape, just on the other side of the glass. I can only suppose a pause, because sometimes they stay for as much as an hour, other times they flit on immediately. It's the welcome antithesis of a subway pause between stations. Or analog? When a pattern is reconstructed with some positives made negatives and some negatives made positive, bnd still other aspects flipped across other axes, binary language falls down. Anyway, the bird is paused on a fire escape, a wind I suppose to be fiercely cold ineffectively ruffles at the little fella's downy feathers, gently light is creeping over the city, and think how glad I am not to be on a subway right now.