usa / you

To all you USA people who blessed us this summer -

so rich, so bountiful, such deep roots -

you were food for the soul.

In Northern Minnesota...

in Minneapolis...

in Brooklyn...

in Manhattan...

in Indiana...

in Atlantic City...

in Beacon...

in the car...

on skype...

and on our walk along the Mississippi that wasn't nearly long enough. And at a cafe on Vanderbilt. At the bike shop, at the wine shop, on the east side, and on the front stoop the night you picked up the chair.

Sitting at your kitchen counter pebbled with rice. Packing the beach towels before the storm rolled in over the ocean -- then, weeks later, rushing to pay the bill as the lightning storm threatened over the roofbar in the midwest.

On Chambers Street, on 65th street, on 29th Street, in Dumbo, at the kiddie playground in Prospect Park, and on 19th Street where you drank hot chocolate as thick as batter and told me about the Indian dancer you once saw performing a traditional dance just down the street. It was a dance that required the dancer to take the evil goddess's spirit into her body and release it, you tell me, and she had do it three times before the dance could come to an end.

orinthology

Yesterday I had the front window in my office open... I was looking at the sunset.



We recently discovered a nest of sparrows in the ivy outside the window.

This interests our cat Birdie greatly.

Last night Lily said she fears a bird will fly into the house. That'll never happen, I said.

Today I came home after work and flung open the windows to the great wild wind that had kicked up in the afternoon. I pulled out the Charlie Parker box set I had recently retrieved from storage in Brooklyn and had been waiting for the right moment to slip into, sat down at the typewriter, and began to type up edits on a couple of new poems.



Birdie, as always, sat out on the windowsill, getting some air. Just when the first of three takes of Orinthology from Parker's March 1946 session came on, the wind kicked up and blew an adjacent window shut and Birdie spooked and fell off the windowsill down onto the brick walk below. I bolted the house and scooped her up. She was shaken, a couple scrapes on the chin.

So I brought Birdie back upstairs, let her go in the house, and heard Juju in the office bashing around over the second take of Orinthology. But it wasn't Juju. It was a bird that had flown in the window. Luckily, it didn't take me long to shoo it out. Luckily, I got there before one of the cats got murderous.

Such a strange confluence of events, all these birds, misplaced, getting into spills, acting recklessly, all at once one afternoon.

Village Life

It's been a week now, back in the village. A week looking at hills again. A week of windows without screens again. And church bells and nutty beer and wondering why everyone's talking German. The trees fat with apples. The poet beside me. And dancing. Summer playlist in my ears.

dominos, the big pink
tell 'em, sleighbells
toxic (dub step remix), yael naim
kiss the ring, raekwon
i think yr a contra, vampire weekend
latin simone, gorillaz
elephants, warpaint
congratulation, MGMT
dancehall queen, robyn
it's in everything, BLK JKS
hold ya, gyptian

bklyn kitchen

before....


during...
including stove delivery, 3 layers of modeling paste to smooth out wood grain on the cabinets...


a stoop sale at which we sold half our belongings...


a search for the perfect door handle which was neither of these...




and picking paint colors (twice), and scrubbing (more than twice), and a mad, city-wide trek through all of the borough's hardware stores for THIS HINGE in silver....


and after...


Then it was finished. Then we left.