INTERSECTIONS
There is a young woman with a wooden hoop
almost as big as herself – and a small dog
not much bigger than her head – who performs
circus tricks, where Terez Boulevard meets
Andrassy Avenue – named for an Empress
and a Count before old Europe fell apart.
As the three lanes idle at red and the dog
waits on the kerb the girl and the hoop
become an astrolabe, a gyroscope
within the interstices of traffic lights.
When she stills and bows to the varied windscreens
the dog leaps to her shoulder and together –
dancer, dog and hoop – they approach their rewards,
ignoring the anonymous tourists
crossing behind her, as if the corrida
with steel and engines were all. Yesterday,
though a slicing wind from the Danube
kept most windows shut, she gyrated
regardless. Today in snowflakes like
falling stars she spins still.
Alan Horne
January 31, 2020A great image.
Catherine Reynolds
February 1, 2020Merely a comment on vocabulary rather than anything else. You are the only other person I can recall, throughout my many changes of career, who uses the word, ‘interstices’. Excellent!
David Selzer
February 2, 2020I relish the word. It’s very English, in a sense – almost pure Latin, but difficult to say if you pronounce it in a latinate as distinct from an English fashion.
John Huddart
February 12, 2020Such a fine piece. To see magic of this kind in an everyday scene, in which the detail suggests the humdrum world of the intersection, but spins like silk into interstices!