The City

The river still finds its brown way through the city's glass and concrete canyons until finally reaching the bay. Its tidal breath has become my own. I live near its mouth. I was not born here but have spent more than half my life a citizen of its urban sprawl. The roots I've sunk hang off a sense of home. There is an ease in living here where the old and the new, the familiar and strange exist in counterpoint and house the needs of the gregarious and the chafed nerves of the recluse. Cafes serve good coffee. In the shadows of apartment towers, old men can shuffle easily down the gentle slope of asphalt paths, carrying words or a rod and sit quietly at the water's edge with their thoughts, fishing for bream or God.