April 4th, 3:31 AM, the intersection of Belmont and the old rail crossing, where the winter had opened a pothole the width of a dining table and the city had responded, eventually, by finding something to put beside it.
They found mine. I recognized the notch in the crown before I recognized anything else about it. Someone had pulled it out of the salt heap, fitted the split base back underneath, and set it down on the north lip of the hole, and it was working. That is the correct word. After the taking and the dragging and the field and the salt, the ninth station of the Gospel of the Orange Traffic Cone shows the cone doing the one thing it was made for. Headless. Cracked. Leaning perhaps three degrees off true. Doing it. The pothole had filled with rainwater and the streetlamp had gone down into it whole, a second lamp, longer and softer than the first, lying at the bottom of the road. There is a Narcissus given to Caravaggio by people who ought to know, in which the entire composition is the figure, the reflection, and a band of darkness holding them apart, and nothing else is permitted into the frame. I permitted nothing else either. The cone. The water. The light going twice.
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