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| *** I push on, compelled by a desire that, in circling the lagoon, I may acquire similar delineation, a boundary of integrity; although I'd feel grateful enough if the exercise could simply quell my tidal panics. Then, almost as soon as I turn south, before I've moved on a few feet, the exalted melancholy of another image arrests me: Black Crowned Night Heron. Nycticorax nycticorax. Perched on a low bough on the west side. A statuesque bird jacketed in blue wing and back feathers, with a streaked black cap. Even the guide book notes the hunched appearance; and I see shoulders raised defensively against cold and loneliness.  | Though I know that's a projection of my own isolation, I can't shake the pathetic sadness it elicits. I turn back, unlock the bike, and roll home in the dark involuntarily burdened with a parting impression of the polluted water throbbing weakly like the fucked-up heartbeat of the planet that parented such fucked-up creatures. II. Dragging thoughts of you through the dark, a series of iambs, jagged, more like dotted 16th notes, that jerked, sobbing rhythm as bike tires thud across eight rails, four parallel tracks, illusorily converging at vanishing point invisible in darkness, muted street lights eliciting glints from plastic reflectors spun on skeletal spokes, ghost bike taking me home to empty rooms that echo my unlived life as when I play Quicksilver's  | |||
