City Walk

I walk down the sidewalk, the sun starting to grow hazy with sunset, the roads quiet, the pavement textured with needles from old-world cedars and cigarette crumbs and the basal leaves of dandelions, and I hear the echoed voices of people in their backyards, sitting on their porches, drinking wine by the hydrangeas, and every few houses I catch a glimpse of a TV in the window, playing cartoons or gameshows, the light flickering against a blank face, and in one window there’s a woman sitting at her kitchen table, surrounded by canvases, some painted, some not, and she holds a paintbrush in her hand, her brow shadowed by the overhead light, and then I pass a bar, the kind where people sit outside on metal tables, and there are men standing there, glass beer bottles in hand, talking loudly, smoking cigarettes, and just past there I notice blackberry vines clinging to a chain-link fence, the house behind it abandoned, panels of carboard blocking the frames where windows should be, and so I stop to eat a blackberry, sour and seedy, and I am transported back to childhood, to sprinklers in the driveway, and bike rides to 7-11, and sitting on the rocks by the river in our bathing suits, and eating blackberries growing wild at the end of the street, our fingers stained purple. And there is sadness in it, that it is gone, but there is also now, the elm trees that hold the wind on their shoulders, and, beyond that, the sweep of crows black-bellied against the sky, and so I keep going, continuing my walk before the sun fades orange into the river.