Sometimes I love walking out from my office into the middle of this city. I always want to be there for this hour when everything pauses, when the capsule breaks open and the evening's blue liquid begins to seep out, darkening everything as night comes on. I love this hour after rush hour, when the shadows lengthen beneath parked cars, and the empty buildings seem to raise themselves floor by fluorescent floor over the darkening world below them. At these times I feel thoughtful but empty, tired from the day's work, happy just to notice the airplanes lowering themselves over the river and to smell the wind blowing through the air.

Sometimes I want the world to teach me how to understand things. Sometimes I just want to rub the static into my eyes as the traffic falls endlessly down 19th Street like a grand procession of headlights going nowhere through the occasion of the dusk. And there they are mouthing words into cell phones as their cars float through red signals at intersections. And who is to say that they aren't simply distracted by their own dreaming? Even if they are dreaming of something so commonplace that they will actually be able to reach out and touch it at the end of their terrible commute to the suburbs, while we will remain standing on these sidewalks long after they are gone, nearly devoured by the bitterness of our own lofty dreaming?

And you would think that some of these things were treasures. That some of these things were treasured. The broken umbrellas littering the streets after each storm like the skeletons of some extinct variety of flightless bird. The little hot-dog stands being towed into the evening. The cops driving around almost inconspicuously in their unmarked cars, searching everywhere for something wrong. That man selling flowers from a dry wall bucket by the subway entrance, the German tourists in the bookstore, those women marching down K Street in those long black skirts slit up the back, all of these things become the world.

Who can touch the singing inside their own body? Who can look at a face and fall in love? Sometimes I wonder which part of the jewel I will touch, which part I will hide under my shirt and make promises to and cry for when it outgrows me?

Sometimes the soft sound of the traffic of cars out the window when I come home late and close the door sounds like rain falling in the tunnels of sleep. Swish and brush of headlights tracing shadows diagonally across my walls and ceiling, as if across the tiled walls of a tunnel below a harbor, where gray battleships are sliding out in the night, to disappear at sea....
What you have been watching and what you have been dreaming are the false pretensions of the planet's wealthiest men, burning forests down, floating their hydroplanes across the Everglades of Cash. So what. Tonight there is a summer thunderstorm watch in effect although it is so hot out I don't believe it will rain for days. I look out the window to the north and see the sky spreading out for the evening, the pinks and oranges and blues of a beautiful pollution. I lie down on the couch and reach for a book. What would Rilke say to us now, here at the end of this century of loneliness that he began? What would he say from his room in some rich Lady's castle, after the World Wars and the Cold War, now that the triumph of the First World of the Heart is complete?

In time, the great secrets will be revealed. The mysteries of our bodies floating through these sequences of star light will fall away, revealing the faces of the people we meant to become. Certain city states will rise or fall in prominence. Lord Stanley's Cup will change hands. Lovers be re-united, Pretenders to the throne and their confederates returned to the rough deserts from which they came...

Yes, one day we will all escape. The dark water towers poised so long for lift off will finally reveal themselves as the escape rockets we long dreamed they might become. The river will rise, flooding the jogging paths, and the traffic of satellites orbiting our planet will become more beautiful to us than the stars. Only a hush will remain. For a moment it will contain everything like a thought or a breath held in expectation. And it will sound like the strange silence of crowded elevators. The silence of fathers. The silence of the sky over the wind.