Invisible Snapshots of the Noonday Traffic

In a restaurant filled with

the smell of curry,

I have become invisible

to everyone, invisible

to myself, outside

the reach of the

wall-mounted televisions

playing the daytime

trash,

something

about white rappers

and their girlfriends,

as vainglorious and

asinine as this hour

warrants,

and

the uncomfortable

young man who

looks vaguely out

into the haze of the

winter inversion,

perhaps waiting for

someone who will

not arrive,

and

the businessmen who

speak of car leases

and gross profits

for the year,

one in bland tones

of native speech,

another tinged with

some other land,

unknowable and

distant, close enough

yet for this conversion,

this incidence upon

the face of the day,

and

the blue uniformed

workman who say

little and move

back and forth

between their table

and the buffet,

especially the one

who is sharp eyed

and wears the round

spectacles of an

inventor, hunching

down to his

Mongolian bowl

of noodles, studious

as a monk,

and

the harried

waiters who slouch

from table to table,

pale beneath their

eyes and hollow,

and

all these people,

all invisible to

themselves, all

moving in darkness

as albino eels in an

underground lake

would do,

and

it is but one

day, one moment

of a day, and then

the time is gone,

the circle broken

the call of the

inaudible bell

atop the imagined

steeple calling us

backward, inward

so that we become

aware again and

pick up those worn

tools of our disparate

trades, the grim

work of killing off

the last of Friday

the freight upon our

shoulders.