Category: landscape

Flanerie or wander or a reach

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What aren’t you willing to believe. A heart  
graffitied fuchsia on the street, a missive from another life.
Remember the stem of lavender you found
in a used copy of Bishop’s poems, a verse underlined:  
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. Suddenly, across the aisle  
a woman with your mother’s bracelets, her left wrist  
all shimmer and gold, you almost winced.  
Coincidence is the great mystery of the human mind
but so is the trans-oceanic reach of Shah Rukh Khan’s  
slow blink. Each of us wants a hint, a song
that dares us to look inside. True, it takes whimsy  
and ego to believe the universe will tap your shoulder  
in the middle of a random afternoon. That t-shirt  
on a stranger’s chest, a bumper sticker on the highway upstate.  
Truth isn’t going anywhere. It’s your eyes passing by.

Sign, Sahar Romani

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Text. Physiologie du flâneur / par M. Louis Huart; vignettes de MM. Alophe, Daumier et Maurisset, 1841. internetactu.blog.lemonde.fr, 2012.

AG2024_1134189a or in  many a poem about green

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Lawns  and  fields  and  hills  and  wide  old   velvet
sleeves, green things.  They stretch, fold, roll away,
unfurl  and  calm the  eye.  Look  lush  in paintings.
Battles are fought on greens.  Or  you could spread
a meal  and  sup.  How  secretly  they  lie,  floors  of
distant forests.  Next  comes  the grave,  in  many a
poem about green. But this is not a poem. This is a
billboard for frozen green peas.  Frozen green peas
are good for pain.

Short Talk on Pain, Anne Carson

AG2021_2030239aa or we take what we can

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For Cheryl Boyce-Taylor and her Malik, our Phife

& I immediately think of Cheryl, her Malik, his beloved
obsession with the team’s orange & blue, a sunset sky over

this city. The ruckus of these players’ sweet grit, the desire they
have to come in first. They rebound & strip like stickup

kids. They pound the paint as if their feet were wrapped in
Timbs, their lean torsos tattered & tapered in Coogi sweaters.

This is New York. Bodega filled with the aroma of a good
chopped cheese. Ambitions racing through our minds fast as

the 2 train during rush hour. I watch the reverie on TV, as
the Garden thrashes & quakes by the tectonic plate of our

steadfast fandom. Don’t get it twisted, capitalism is dying

& yet here I am rooting for boys bred to burn out their bodies
to make billionaires more billions. Was this what Rome felt like

toward the end? When the colosseums filled with gladiators
stirred the masses into a frenzy. How the people hungered for

food & freedom, but instead lost themselves in the carnal play
of sacrifice—reliable warriors, safer to believe in than

Caesar. No matter, I think Phife would’ve loved this team,
unflappable & carefree, anti-establishment, uncompromising.

What happens to the heart of a city when its people survive
on air; that space between the flick of the wrist & the swish

of a three-point buzzer beater? We fight for a win to fill
the ache of losing: Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ayiti. We take

what we can, celebrate small victories until we win everything
we thought we never could—

As Capitalism Gasps for Breath I Watch the Knicks Game, Yesenia Montilla

As if … To Eden wandered in

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Untitled (Flows and veils; garden syntactic arrangements of forms; they hold unknown, and therefore dangerous possibilities)

As if some little Arctic flower,
Upon the polar hem,
Went wandering down the latitudes,
Until it puzzled came
To continents of summer,
To firmaments of sun,
To strange, bright crowds of flowers,
And birds of foreign tongue!
I say, as if this little flower
To Eden wandered in —
What then? Why, nothing, only,
Your inference therefrom!

Emily Dickinson