01 May 2010

High rise

The 6th floor of the tower block is good.  Lower you couldn't see as far, higher and the scale becomes un-human.  Morning, the view off the balcony of other blocks and the grounds below with the people below sweeping, picking at the plants, holding dogs on leads, it's like a panoramic television.  It draws the eye from the sky.  The sky, today I can see the sky, it has lifted from the top of the buildings where it has squatted, sultry and moist, for the last couple of days.  The ghost skeletons of skyscrapers resolve into metal cages on top of the buildings.  The sky is still a grey white palette, but now tinged with yellow weak sunshine. 
In the morning too the frogs have stopped their baritone moaning; in the absence of pigeons to irritatingly coo at all times, the frogs took this niche in the night.  The angry dog on the 8th floor of the adjacent block, the one that belongs to the angry man and his Indonesian wife, that dog wants to become part of the accepted night chorus and spends it's time auditioning, it's bark raw.
I can hear conversations float up on the air but they don't intrude as I don't understand the local language.  The mornings are pleasantly cooler after hot days and self-inflicted fevered evenings; mornings I relax with coffee on the balcony and slip back into the book I am reading.

1 comment:

  1. I've come back to this 3 or 4 times and each time get a different sense of the place you are describing - but now I see you sitting on the balcony, glancing up, taking in what is around you - seeing and hearing - and returning to your book.

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