Today we head to New York (the great experiment continues). Seedlings on pause, Sahadi’s awaits. My what a world this is, this morning it was all fresh daffodils and birdsong, tomorrow we’ll wake up with the mists swirling over the river and the Manhattan Bridge lifting up her skirts to keep them dry. Or, depending on how the city summer’s swinging, these swirling misty platforms may have already burnt off by 8am. You never know until you’re in the thick of it. But this, I love. From Meags:
Manhattan Dawn (1945)
There is a smoke of memory
That curls about these chimneys
And then uncurls; that lifts,
Diaphanous, from sleep
To lead us down some alleyway
Still vaguely riverward;
And so at length disperses
Into the wisps and tatters
That garland fire escapes.
—And we have found ourselves again
Watching, beside a misty platform,
The first trucks idling to unload
(New England’s frost still
Unstippling down their sides).
Or turned
To catch blue truant eyes upon us
Through steam that rose up suddenly from a grate . . .
Grinning—
And the grin slid off across the storefronts.
Dawn always seemed to overtake us, though,
Down Hudson somewhere, or Horatio.
—And we have seen it bend
The long stripes of the awnings down
Toward gutters where discarded flowers
Lay washing in the night’s small rain—
Hints, glimmerings of a world
Not ours.
And office towers
Coast among lost stars.
Donald Justice
Feather By Feather 