You can just make out the arches of the Pleasant Street Bridge beyond the metal pipe fence. Normally, I'm focused on what is beyond the fence: the rushing water and the marvelous white noise of the cascade. I hunt there for wildlife and the tricks of light. But this day I study the obstacles and those immediate things that eclipse my dreaming.
It's also, perhaps, a portrait of a society going through a downturn. Someone should pull those weeds and paint the fence and fix the crumbling stone walls. Or should they? I'll draw it either way. And the old ways will prevail in the end.
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
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