attributes, and of those bars. But while the cricket’s in it, there’s the ridge-and-file system of its wings, and you can see its song.
A blowfish, inflated, shellacked and spiky—and hollow as a mason jar.
Coral, held in the hand. The starry spaces bodies left, shallow but enterable.
The displays at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Not only because of the glass between us, but for the intercessory care taken—so that the distant mountain’s painted shadow and the hunter-gatherer’s shadow from the overhead lights do not overlap, there on the plains of Central Africa, where the “family preparing a meal” might, at any moment invite you in.
And while I’m in New York: window displays: their stillness amid the crowds, even if the little fisher-boy’s rod dips in and out of a plastic revolving lake-surface, and even if the off-site fan is set to lift and float and settle the silk across the mannequin’s ever-hardened nipples. Even though I sometimes am made to want what I see. Standing there, in the crowd, all the traffic noise eddying behind me—I cup my hands to the sides of my eyes, and though people cough (usually makes for a “no”—see “planetarium” below) and yell and jostle, and jumble their bags and exhort, they are, of course, supposed to be doing that. They’re a crowd . And I, while standing and looking, am apart.
Not the planetarium—someone always coughs, disturbing the universe. Not the theater, not the movies: too many others admitted, your knee touching another’s knee at one small point on the curvilinear, the whole of your musculature now distracting.
Alone with the visiting comet. Telescopes, yes.
Pressing a knuckle into a closed eye for the bursts, as I did when I was a child before sleep, so all kinds of time would collapse.
The way a busy street clears for a moment of its traffic, fills with the hum of emptiness, which throbs, which arrives like the moment a banner ends in its open-most unfurling. How long can it possibly last, that squall of silence, filling and surging, as loud as anything that’s been calling and calling, unheard, all this time.
Bubbles. Only, briefly.
An apartment peephole, if you can tiptoe up, breathe very quietly, and do not intend to open the door.
Oven windows. Not-opening to peek.
Two of my friends got sugar eggs every year: Yvonne, whose family in Germany sent one at Easter, and Ilene, who was given a new egg at Passover. Ilene kept each egg (from Itgen’s Coffee Shop in Valley Stream, NY) in its cellophane wrapping on a shelf. One was the size of a football; others were small, like walnuts or lemons or grapes. I loved to take them down and look at them when I visited, which was often. I was happy when, over time, the wrappings dried and fell off and I could hold the eggs’ rough crystal curves in one hand and darken or brighten the scene with the other. Sometimes I came away with flecks of sugar on my hand. My sister and I never got sugar eggs.
Not getting: absolutely.
The Pin
Nothing can trouble the dominance of
the true image. Whether from graves or from rooms,
let him praise finger-ring, bracelet and jug.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
. . . a chair
beautiful and useless
like a cathedral in the universe . . .
—Zbignew Herbert
W hat the pin wants, sharp now and sprung, bright ache in the last green grass before winter, is its tension restored, hand in its pocket, head in its helmet again.
I’m leaving it there so I might come upon it, so what I call today might assemble—morning’s low slant around the pin’s open arc, late afternoon’s autumn light darkening already as I walk home.
I do not touch it, do not fix it, and always, by the time I come upon it resting on the corner lawn of the sociologist’s house, I’ve worked up to a good pace, full of intention. And there’s the pin, a prize, a treasure, bright enough for a child to grab, but I
A blowfish, inflated, shellacked and spiky—and hollow as a mason jar.
Coral, held in the hand. The starry spaces bodies left, shallow but enterable.
The displays at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Not only because of the glass between us, but for the intercessory care taken—so that the distant mountain’s painted shadow and the hunter-gatherer’s shadow from the overhead lights do not overlap, there on the plains of Central Africa, where the “family preparing a meal” might, at any moment invite you in.
And while I’m in New York: window displays: their stillness amid the crowds, even if the little fisher-boy’s rod dips in and out of a plastic revolving lake-surface, and even if the off-site fan is set to lift and float and settle the silk across the mannequin’s ever-hardened nipples. Even though I sometimes am made to want what I see. Standing there, in the crowd, all the traffic noise eddying behind me—I cup my hands to the sides of my eyes, and though people cough (usually makes for a “no”—see “planetarium” below) and yell and jostle, and jumble their bags and exhort, they are, of course, supposed to be doing that. They’re a crowd . And I, while standing and looking, am apart.
Not the planetarium—someone always coughs, disturbing the universe. Not the theater, not the movies: too many others admitted, your knee touching another’s knee at one small point on the curvilinear, the whole of your musculature now distracting.
Alone with the visiting comet. Telescopes, yes.
Pressing a knuckle into a closed eye for the bursts, as I did when I was a child before sleep, so all kinds of time would collapse.
The way a busy street clears for a moment of its traffic, fills with the hum of emptiness, which throbs, which arrives like the moment a banner ends in its open-most unfurling. How long can it possibly last, that squall of silence, filling and surging, as loud as anything that’s been calling and calling, unheard, all this time.
Bubbles. Only, briefly.
An apartment peephole, if you can tiptoe up, breathe very quietly, and do not intend to open the door.
Oven windows. Not-opening to peek.
Two of my friends got sugar eggs every year: Yvonne, whose family in Germany sent one at Easter, and Ilene, who was given a new egg at Passover. Ilene kept each egg (from Itgen’s Coffee Shop in Valley Stream, NY) in its cellophane wrapping on a shelf. One was the size of a football; others were small, like walnuts or lemons or grapes. I loved to take them down and look at them when I visited, which was often. I was happy when, over time, the wrappings dried and fell off and I could hold the eggs’ rough crystal curves in one hand and darken or brighten the scene with the other. Sometimes I came away with flecks of sugar on my hand. My sister and I never got sugar eggs.
Not getting: absolutely.
The Pin
Nothing can trouble the dominance of
the true image. Whether from graves or from rooms,
let him praise finger-ring, bracelet and jug.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
. . . a chair
beautiful and useless
like a cathedral in the universe . . .
—Zbignew Herbert
W hat the pin wants, sharp now and sprung, bright ache in the last green grass before winter, is its tension restored, hand in its pocket, head in its helmet again.
I’m leaving it there so I might come upon it, so what I call today might assemble—morning’s low slant around the pin’s open arc, late afternoon’s autumn light darkening already as I walk home.
I do not touch it, do not fix it, and always, by the time I come upon it resting on the corner lawn of the sociologist’s house, I’ve worked up to a good pace, full of intention. And there’s the pin, a prize, a treasure, bright enough for a child to grab, but I
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