The Mask of My Desire – Mark Parsons

September 13, 2024

Beet-red maples
Across a parking garage and apartments
Drift in a frictionless tracking shot, as weightless and limpid
As delicate thumbs of dulse seaweed
That rock in the gentle, relentless current of Time, that’s my memory
Of a sunrise in August, or July,
That was many mornings in August or July,
When I walked the neighborhood north of the station till dawn
Because my apartment was too hot for sleeping.
Small wooden hand-painted signs
Staked in plant beds
Provide the names of the shrubs and trees
Bordering the plaza and walkway that overlooks the bus pool.
The granite ledges of the planters,
On close inspection, red, grey, and charcoal flecks.
Peaks of glass brick filter the light
Down to people lined up to wait for busses
To arrive or open their doors. The few pedestrians topside
Stay on a path of cropped rubber carpet
Because the paving tiles remain slick with condensation
Yet to bind with haze and particulate.
Where the plaza branches off to an overpass,
And crosswalks to the north and east,
A pyramid of large, diamond-shaped panes of dirty glass
Sits above the buses waiting below. A vented capstone of burnished steel
Will cascade water down each aspect
Once the department stores open and there are shoppers, women with their children,
To enjoy the sound of the water
Collecting in a granite trough around the base.
Next to the pyramid a helical staircase descends to a high vaulted corridor
Faintly lit with sunlight filtered from above,
And leading to where the buses are parked around a teardrop-shaped island
Planted with shrubbery trimmed to look like
River rocks or eggs,
Amid rough-hewn pink granite blocks
Radiating from a single point as if in supplication to a grey obelisk
Monolithic at the center—
No one above uses the winding stairs
Because the gate of tall, polished steel bars won’t be unlocked
For another hour.
I’ve walked the neighborhood north of the station
Until dawn
Thinking of the woman
Who is every woman I think about
During these nights of surreal heat, who saw in me
Her own destruction
And left before she wasn’t able to leave.
I dreamed about her long before I met her, but I didn’t know I was dreaming.
And since she has been gone
She haunts me as every woman I’ve had,
Wearing my desire like a mask.