Monday, August 06, 2007
Here's a poem by Jean Valentine!
Night
From this night on God let me eat
like that blind child on the train
touching her yogurt as I'd touch a spiderweb
that first morning in the country--sky red--
holding the carton and spoon to her mouth
with all her eyeless body, and then
orientally resting, the whole time smiling
a little to one side of straight ahead.
8/1/07
On our walk into Union Square the headline for the New York Post reads “Ugly day for Vinny the Gorgeous”. The dapper young mobster, aged 45, pulls at the collar of his jacket suit with his left hand, smiles. In Union Square on a warm august day. Students from a film school summer camp act and film in clusters throughout the park. In front of me near a beech tree two boys look bad ass in their baseball caps, one holds a wooden bat, the other a ball. They keep enacting the same scene, one in which they shake hands and smile into the camera. It’s been five minutes, and they have acted the scene five times already. Now another boy, apparently the director, tells them what the next scene will be. They will walk down the pathway, and stop to stand near yellow leaf that marks their pause.
As I ran over the Brooklyn Bridge this morning, there was humid air rising from the river up over the cars and by cement to us on the promenade. There was the city- buildings filled with more people than I could imagine, streets packed with more people then I have met in my life. The immensity of place overwhelms me and then, the way a thought at first seems impossible and then is possible, the reality of NYC excited me. Running down Broadway to the square, I passed so many, all these eyes, these cabs, pigeons, windows, and curbs. All these hands which clutched plastic bags or coffee cups. All this is about possibility. Maybe my own, but also the feeling that anything could happen at any time, and happily. I would never been able to have imagined this particular thing happening. The people I’ve met, the friends or just acquaintances I’ve had recently, I could never have imagined them as they have appeared. ¶ 5:02 AM
Night
From this night on God let me eat
like that blind child on the train
touching her yogurt as I'd touch a spiderweb
that first morning in the country--sky red--
holding the carton and spoon to her mouth
with all her eyeless body, and then
orientally resting, the whole time smiling
a little to one side of straight ahead.
8/1/07
On our walk into Union Square the headline for the New York Post reads “Ugly day for Vinny the Gorgeous”. The dapper young mobster, aged 45, pulls at the collar of his jacket suit with his left hand, smiles. In Union Square on a warm august day. Students from a film school summer camp act and film in clusters throughout the park. In front of me near a beech tree two boys look bad ass in their baseball caps, one holds a wooden bat, the other a ball. They keep enacting the same scene, one in which they shake hands and smile into the camera. It’s been five minutes, and they have acted the scene five times already. Now another boy, apparently the director, tells them what the next scene will be. They will walk down the pathway, and stop to stand near yellow leaf that marks their pause.
As I ran over the Brooklyn Bridge this morning, there was humid air rising from the river up over the cars and by cement to us on the promenade. There was the city- buildings filled with more people than I could imagine, streets packed with more people then I have met in my life. The immensity of place overwhelms me and then, the way a thought at first seems impossible and then is possible, the reality of NYC excited me. Running down Broadway to the square, I passed so many, all these eyes, these cabs, pigeons, windows, and curbs. All these hands which clutched plastic bags or coffee cups. All this is about possibility. Maybe my own, but also the feeling that anything could happen at any time, and happily. I would never been able to have imagined this particular thing happening. The people I’ve met, the friends or just acquaintances I’ve had recently, I could never have imagined them as they have appeared. ¶ 5:02 AM
