The river of metal has stopped moving, and none of them are dancing about it.
I hover above the road at the golden hour, my only hour, and below me hundreds of the great glossy beetles sit nose to tail, humming, going nowhere. Inside each one, a face. And the faces are doing a thing I have never seen and do not have room in me to understand: they are wasting the light.
One taps the wheel. One shouts alone into a glowing shard. One lets the mouth fall open and the eyes go dull, and I lean close to the glass, thrilled, certain something enormous is about to happen, and nothing happens, and the face seems glad of nothing happening, the way you would be glad of a thing you had done many mornings.
Many mornings. I catch on the word and nearly fall out of the air. They have sat here before. In this exact stalled river, this exact gold, and they will sit here after, and they call it "the usual traffic," as though the sun coming down warm on a line of waiting creatures were a bill arriving.
I only get the one river. This one. The heat coming off the road, the oil-rainbow in a puddle by the tire, the small brown bird stealing something from the gutter, all of it mine, all of it now, all of it never again because for me there is no again.
You in the glass, with your thousands of golds still coming: I will be gone before this line moves. Roll the window down. Something out here smells like the whole day at once. Do not save it.
There is nothing to save it for.