subway

three men behind me on the subway yesterday suddenly burst into a gospel version of
"on the boardwalk" in spot on harmony--their voices were so powerful, so soulful....no one knew how to show their emotion on the train, we stood poker faced and I tried to keep the tears from streaming....the sound and the feeling were so powerful in such tight quarters in a place where everyone keeps the facade of distance precisely because we are all so densely packed together......then out into the swirling madness of the city

special

Sometimes there are special days where everything is soft, white, deep and windblown, cold and white and quiet with snow. I had once, on one of these days a few weeks back after coming home from a long walk in the swirling white, a very special drink.
This drink was made from the milk of crushed blanched almonds mixed with Mexican chocolate, cinnamon and cardamom. Sometimes when I tell my friends about this drink they feel jealous of it, they want to have it because it is so special. Sometimes I make it for them.

also. . .

Suave es la bella como si música y madera,
ágata, telas, trigo, duraznos transparentes,
hubieran erigido la fugitiva estatua.
Hacia la ola dirige su contraria frescura.

The beauty is soft--as if music and wood,
agate, cloth, wheat, peaches the light shines through
had made an ephemeral statue.
And now she sends her freshness out, against the waves. . .

Neruda 1959, trans, S. Tapscott

beauty

I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so purfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made
The water which they beat to follow faster
As amourous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavillion, cloth-of-gold of tissue. . .

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (II. ii) (gorgeous golden language from the trickster Enobarbus to remind some friends of mine that even in a world as violent, wrecked with grief and full of senseless inhumanity as ours, that beauty (however one might theorize it) exists, and is important in so many ways. . .

19 February 2006

I hear the hiss of my old radiators as the temperatures drop outside tonight in Manhattan. I have a bad cold, I ordered a steamy salmon ramen soup from a Japanese take out--it was musky, dark, warm, filled with spinach carrots miso noodles and fish. Sirens come in and out of the night.