Reflections on an Aerial Photograph of a City on a River

I’ve heard it said – and who hasn’t – that this city is circles within circles. I’ve heard it said that a city within a circle is European, and that all these rings interconnect even as other rings rise from limestone, through the earth, breaking concrete, pushing great circles of steel and glass further still into the curve of the concave sky as if to challenge the primacy of the heavens and plant a root in the clouds themselves. Yes, The Heavens, too, are fallen.

A circle is a garrote and an embrace. A circle is a mistake you never learn from and its the only direction home. And two broken circles straddle a river called Cumberland like big, dumb, broken lockets, mutely pouring secret whispers into the green water that will circle back toward western bluegrass and shine its treasures in the blue moonlight, appearing early and foretelling the future.

A biscuit, a salty slice of pork, a thin pancake crunching on the edges, orange juice in a small glass with tiny, green-tangled leaves dancing along the painted rim, and a round plate full of circles adds up to a square meal at the start of the day for a cowboy or a conman or a gentleman from Kurdistan with a wife and a black-haired baby and a half-dream-home that he left on the other side of a circular sphere we all agree to call the Earth just to round the whole thing off.

Circle back and pick me up. Pick up the tab. We can square up later.

A circle is just points on a plane, pointing toward their common center. But, is the center the source, or simply a reference — merely a point itself? A circle doesn’t exist without a center, but every point is part of countless circles tangled in a Euclidean underbrush just as every center is centered in every smalling circle radiating in from the edge of nowhere infinity into

This.

Here.

Now.

Tycho crater is a round crater in the South of the roundly moon. At 108 million years it is a newborn among the rocks and came to life as a daughter of Mother Moon and her Father, Baptistina, of the family Baptistina: Acloud-like clan of asteroids that loved the blue moon and left a mark when it reached out to touch her face. Tycho’s shape is perfect in the sharp shadows that rake her razor rim and she is named for an astronomer who lost half of his face beneath the heavy arc of a falling, silver broadsword.

His nose was replaced with one made of gold.

Tycho was the site of the excavation of the great monolith in 2001, five years before another Baptist monument Billy Grahamed from the middle of this circle here, completing a circle between a city of Athena and the solar reflection of Selene, kissing her country cousin in the midst of midheaven.