After a meal in a spot where the families around us made the experience even better, we made a quick stop by Orchard Beach where a man we wanted to believe was older than either of us, had all the dance moves on the board walk. Despite a few wrong turns and a little more of Westchester County than we meant to see, it was a Mother’s Day and birthday combined that was among the best. Not only sunshine but smiles in abundance — families celebrating and enjoying what was right in front of them.

Looking further into City Island, I found two blogs I will go back to frequently, surely before my next day off in the Five Boroughs — Ephemeral New York and Walking Off the Big Apple.

Thinking about mothers, boats, time passing, I reread Lucille Clifton’s  Blessing the Boats. This short poem gives several benedictions, the ending one – and may you in your innocence/sail through this to that.

For more poetry — from last week’s PSA annual awards and Frost Lecture — see my post at the Best American Poetry blog. It’s a terrific site to explore and read regularly.

Visitors to the museum were invited to lie back on the carpet and imagine it magic; questions were raised by exhibit critics about whether this installation was more evasive and placating or more provocative and evocative. The echoes of Samarkand monuments

and tapchen in Tashkent

and tea house hospitality were strong.

PrayWay offered me another possible layer, another way to consider a place that for many people has been, and as it turned out was for me, more en route than a destination.

The mixture of foreign objects and their placement in a museum devoted to open artistic expression has, for me, at first, a familiarizing effect. A moment later, the foreignness reignites.

A Rune, Interminable

Low above the moss
a sprig of scarlet berries
soon eaten or blackened
tells time.

Go to a wedding
as to a funeral:
bury the loss.

Go to a funeral
as to a wedding:
marry the loss.

Go to a coming
as to a going:
unhurrying.

Time is winter-green.
Seeds keep time.
Time, so kept, carries us
across to no-time where

no time is lost.

– Marie Ponsot

The poet reads the poem beautifully at Knopf’s website

Reading the poem after having just passed the Santiago Calatrava sculpture, the shiny sculptural shape seems now seed-like. I look a bit further to learn that the sculpture had been designed in a contest run by the editors of the New York Times Magazine to coincide with an exhibit at the museum in 1999-2000 called “Capturing Time.”  A quick call to the AMNH offices asking whether the items are actually currently inside the capsule that sits outside the museum elicits an inconclusive response and the suggestion that I contact the New York Times. More mildly and occasionally curious than committed to investigative reporting in this instance and aware that time capsules are frequently lost or found empty when opened generations later, I content myself with consideration of its (possible) contents, and go back to the poem.

Time, so kept, carries us

across to no-time where

no time is lost.

Just the same, if anyone reading resolves this rune and lets me know, I would be much obliged. And if we find out what’s here on 79th Street & Columbus, what might be in Chicago’s Millenium Park in what its creator Anish Kapoor calls Cloud Gate but what everyone else calls, lovingly, The Bean?

Another came after the reading. Vijay Seshadri talked to me about the challenges of reading Larkin, of getting your mouth around his words, hearing them — in your voice, in his.  He compared reading Philip Larkin aloud and reading  Elizabeth Bishop aloud.

“Try it,” he said. “Read ‘At the Fishhouses’, and read ‘Church Going.’ Try it.” I do. Four lines into each, the difference in mechanics of speech alone is striking. Contrasts expand and strengthen with each read.

Nourishment, space constraints, and lines from John Berryman, occupy my essay, “A Concern with Space Leads Elsewhere” at the new Inquisitive Eater from New School.

With your next meal — alone or with another — and surely with food, read poems. A suggested list, to start:

Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses”

Larkin’s “Church Going“. (listen on YouTube or read in the new The Complete Poems. edited by Archie Burnett (FSG, 2012)

Poochigian’s poems in 2011 in The Dark Horse or in his Cosmic Purr

Seshadri’s “The Descent of Man.”

Berryman’s Dream Song 29

What do you see, taste, hear?  Let me know…

The solitude in those photos, the vast, near frightening, alone-ness of my time in Central Asia, seems more pronounced than it has anytime in the six months I have been home. Almost all of the photos are of me seeing others.

Octavio Paz writes in The Labyrinth of Solitude (Grove Press, 1961)

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another…. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

Perhaps it is this time of keeping good company that has brought this ability to see that solitude. In his Paris Review interview, Paz responds to the question:

How and why does an idea seize you? How do you decide if it is prose or poetry?

PAZ

I don’t have any hard-and-fast rules for this. For prose, it would seem that the idea comes first, followed by a desire to develop the idea. Often, of course, the original idea changes, but even so the essential fact remains the same: prose is a means, an instrument. But in the case of poetry, the poet becomes the instrument. Whose? It’s hard to say. Perhaps language. I don’t mean automatic writing. For me, the poem is a premeditated act. But poetry flows from a psychic well related to language, that is, related to the culture and memory of a people. An ancient, impersonal spring intimately linked to verbal rhythm.

I could not bear reading Anna Akhmatova while I was in Tashkent. Again and again I’d try, but never close, always holding her at a distance. Maybe I can read her closely now.

Time now to eat grits with these friends before heading for the next thing…and keeping in touch.

Aspects of modernism, biography, and patronage assemble as do the artists in the Steins’ salon in the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit “The Steins Collect.” Images of paintings and photographs and excerpts from Rebecca Rabinow’s wall text sparked thoughts and reading hours after seeing the show. The patrons and the artists, the writers and the painters, their connections, shared intimacies and aesthetics, collaborations and fallings-out; how many owned and cherished one of Cezanne’s “Bathers”, Picasso’s remark of his famous portrait of Stein that  she “would look like that someday”, and especially Picasso’s “Nude with Joined Hands”. The color!

The morning-after’s reflection led me to Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits, to Tender Buttons, to Rae Armantrout and back again to Denise Levertov.

 The Mystery of Deep Candor

Smiling at the instant decoration the egg makes, and seeking a word or two to entertain myself, I want a poem. A breakfast poem? Eggs? The egg poems I pull up on my iPad do not do much for me this morning. I remember “Oatmeal” by Galway Kinnell and smile instantly, find it online, reread it and enjoy it again, imagine someday perhaps the children in the next booth might. I don’t follow the lead to John Keats but to Galway Kinnell’s friend and classmate, W. S. Merwin.

In his 1987 Paris Review interview, W. S. Merwin responded to questions about his ecological and environmental consciousness and whether his urge to improve the world had been influenced by his Presbyterian minister father.

I don’t think it was an urge to improve the world. It was an urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say, and at the time in danger of being ignored and destroyed…There was something incomplete about the world of streets and sidewalks and cement — and I did have a very strong sense of growing plants and trees and so forth, and still do. I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jersey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there.

As I walk in Manhattan, I often think about what lies under all the asphalt here or here. How much of it looks like the rock we see exposed by the river, in the parks? One of the many reasons I love Central Park, especially the massive schist outcropping of Summit Rock at the intersection of 83rd and CPW is that it reminds me of the substrata shoring up, pushing up against all we have built on top of it.

Standing on the balcony of the top floor of the New Museum looking South, it is hard to imagine the substrata, to see past and beneath the impressive skyline.

Thursday, scurrying back across Central Park from the East Side (where all my doctors’ offices seem to be) to my desk to keep chasing an essay I’d begun earlier, the beauty of Spring slows me down — blooms, sunlight, people, sprinklers on the lawns. I take a quick turn left just past the Delacorte Theater where three young girls are struggling with heavy camera cases, giggling with excited anticipation. A film shoot, I surmise, and continue. Shakespeare Garden is my destination, anticipating the flowers and remembering my enchantment with the spot when I discovered it in 2004 — my first Spring in New York.

The mound of rock on which the 4-acre garden is planted catches my attention first, especially the flowering trees growing from between its cracks and crevices. Persistent, determined, and beautiful trees — well-tended, nurtured, cared-for by Central Park Conservancy staff and volunteers.

Farther along, on the other side of the hill, descending toward the Swedish Cottage, the rock gives way to rich soil from which springs a stand of brilliant blue grape hyacinths and hot pink tulips that take me back to Sunday’s Easter egg 4 days earlier and 70 blocks south. I listen again to W. S. Merwin’s words.

In his tribute poem “Berryman”, Merwin writes:

he said the great presence

that permitted everything and transmuted it

in poetry was passion

passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

About Berryman in his interview, he says,  …his sense of language was passionate and had immense momentum. His integrity was absolute. He was a wacky man, but that devotion was like a pure flame all the time….

My last stop before the scurry west to my desk is to photograph a bit of Shakespeare at the edge of the Garden…

and how wacky with blooms are the crevices.

Jean Valentine, in the NY1 story, says,”It’s a godsend, because there you are, you know, tired, or whatever, and there’s a poem to take you out of yourself and bring you to a good place.” Sandra Bloodworth, director of the MTA’s Arts for Transit and Urban Design, emphasized how much riders had missed the Poetry In Motion program.

For me personally, the original Poetry In Motion postings in NYC subways and buses, were powerful in validating what I had been doing, turning to poetry for companionship and understanding, inspiration and reminders of beauty, humor and joy, as my family and I lived through the unrelenting assault of our older son’s still-undiagnosed degenerative illness. Moving to NYC in 2003, not formally educated in poetry, I had found it first in the bookstore adjacent to the Mayo Clinic in a trip there with our son, then in my father-in-law’s books when he died and I had the delightful task of sorting through the volumes he’d accumulated in his office at Princeton since 1947. My reading had been almost clandestine; poems on the subway gave and will again add that vibrant sense of shared solitudes, adjacent privacies.

Way to go, MTA!  – For Dorothea Tanning fans, see also, published last fall by Graywolf, Coming to That. Ms. Tanning, sculptor, painter & writer, died in January at the age of 101.