Summer is road construction season and all over the city streets are being gouged into ragged trenches by day. At night the holes are covered by huge steel plates so traffic can resume and the plates have burned onto their surfaces their company name, cauterized by arc welding into wormy ropy letters.

Near my house the plates say "Amor Co." of which I like the idea, a company whose business is producing love, as though that were even possible and I am amused at how far steel plates are from even being a start to that endeavor. At sunset the fading sun picks the letters out brilliantly and they glow silver against the tarred filthy surface and I would like to take a picture but that would mean standing in the middle of Fulton Street at the tail end of rush hour, squatting, standing, stretching, working the angles for the shot and that is probably not going to happen.

Near my gym the plates say simply "Halcyon" and I love this, of course, and wish for the strength to pick the plates up and find underneath exactly what the promise is, as I do read that as a promise if not iron-clad, then steel-clad for sure. I did try to shoot this, craning through an overcast day for the light to materialize the image, traffic burping past my legs, gravel splatter, but finally failure.