The View from Dmitri’s Apartment
Robert Ford
The four lanes of the road, with its
fickle asphalt, appeared to be
straight, in the same way that the
horizon makes the Earth look flat;
only from a certain perspective,
or with undamaged wings, can
you truly appreciate its curve, yet
somewhere beyond our sight, it
began that imperceptible turn to the
left. Eventually, it would wrap itself
right around the entire city, in an
orbit of imperfect symmetry, and
come back to this very point, where
it was, in fact, beginning to quietly
eat itself. So all those people we
could see walking, seven floors below,
sand grains at the mercy of something
unseen, or else riding in buses and
on bicycles, were never really going
anywhere. And the fields and trees,
the cemeteries visible on the other
side, were probably nothing more than
a painting, or a collage of assorted
illusions the width of a whole
continent, unfurling itself eastwards
as far as our eyes could travel.
Robert Ford lives on the east coast of Scotland, and writes poetry, short stories and non-fiction. His poetry has appeared previously in publications in the UK and US, including Clear Poetry, Firewords, Melancholy Hyperbole, and Wildflower Muse. More of his work can be found at https://wezzlehead.wordpress.com/