One of Those Summer Afternoons (New York - São Paolo)

Our summer series, Poetry in Animation, continues with "That Little Something" by Charles Simic (for Li-Young Lee)

The likelihood of ever finding it is small.
It's like being accosted by a woman
And asked by her to look for a pearl
She lost right here in the street.

She could be making it all up,
Even her tears, you say to yourself,
As you search under your feet,
Thinking, Not in a million years....

Photo: Paolo Gasparini (São Paolo, 1972)

It's one of those summer afternoons
When one needs a good excuse
To step out of a cool shade.
In the meantime, what ever became of her?

And why, years later, do you still,
Off and on, cast your eyes to the ground
As you hurry to some appointment
Where you are now certain to be late?

Here we have a title for a photograph that could itself be a poem: "This Sky We See Here" (Acá este cielo que vemos). Paolo Gasparini's image from São Paolo, 1972. Part of the exhibit, Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography 1944-2013, at the International Center for Photography.

Death Takes the M4

Is a subway car the place to ponder mortality? Is there any better? Maybe one, a bus stop, preferably on a Sunday afternoon. We resume our response to the MTA's Poetry in Motion series with David Ferry's "At the Bus Stop; Eurydice,"

Harry Callahan, Detroit (1943)

The old lady's face,
Who knows whose it was?
The bus slid by me,
Who in the world knows me?

She was amazed, amazed.
Can death really take me?
The bus went away.
It took the old lady away.

What is the quintessential subway rider's question? "Who in the world knows me?" is as good a candidate as any.

Signs and Wonders

From the Atacama Desert, Chile.

Leaving Socaire

No passing. This is reserved for very few spots. In general, hills and curves are not an impediment to passing.

School crossing. From a distance, it looked like a woman carrying an upside down watering can. Just a case of decal peel. Here's the real thing, with a very quaint fire hydrant from the village of Socaires:

Tocanao

Children at play. Futbal, what else?

Animal crossing means vicuña crossing. The wild cousin of the llama, we saw quite a few vicuñas grazing peacefully. It didn't seem likely that they could leap as pictured above.

The sign I wish I'd photographed. Having driven 10 kms out of San Pedro to reach the well-marked turn-off for Valle de la Luna, and another two on an unsealed road, we discovered this exit to the park was cerrado. The other road at the fork had a sign, in Spanish and English: "No passage. Mine fields." Backtracking a few kilometers to arrive at the more obscurely marked entrance to the park was well worth it.

Valle de la Luna

Calama Settles for Copper

When I told our Chilean colleagues that we would fly to Calama for our free days, they did a double take. Then I explained we would drive from there to San Pedro, an oasis in the Atacama desert. Everyone was relieved. "Calama is the place you run away from," they said. And yet, getting off the plain directly onto the tarmac of the tiny Calama airport, in the middle of winter, ....

Our flight there, on Sunday afternoon, was almost entirely made up of men. They had the look of people who'd done it before. Miners, construction workers, and possibly astronomers at the ALMA observatory ("mostly Russian, mostly men," our guide told us on the way to the Chaxa lagoons from San Pedro.)

On the way back, the two-hour delay meant waiting for boarding in a temporary (?) gate area: Plenty of men hunched over portable devices watching or listening to the Brazil-Germany match. "Cinco!" one fellow announced to those of us in line. Germany had stuck its fifth goal in the first half of what turned out to be a shellacking of the home team. Everybody was in good spirits, since Brazil had eliminated Chile's fine side on penalty kicks in the last round.

(Photo: T. Blythe)

Calama, as a city, would not exist if it were not for the copper deposits in its outlying regions, which gives the desert a greenish tinge. In the rotary by the airport, the city honors its provider. A sun and a bar of copper.

Road Hogs

For the first year or so of BTB, I used Nellie Mae Rowe's Pig on Expressway (1980) as my header art. Rowe, who died in 1982, lived in Vinings, George, just across the Chattahoochee River from Atlanta. Her house was lodged between its two very busy expressways: I-75 and I-285.

A more recent discovery, here is Kurt Knobelsdorf's Swine, Man and Van. The artist lives and works in Miami. Is there something particularly (or peculiarly) southern about pigs on the road?

Sandwich Board

Doing some research on the Jane Bowles-Staten Island-Perth Amboy connection, I came across this 2000 photograph by Eli Reed of the Mercedes Cafe. The diner is on Smith Street, around the corner from the train station. A Google search indicates it is still going strong with good reviews for the Cubano.

I love hand-drawn items on menu boards. The sandwiches on these are great examples of the form.

They put me in mind of a piece I saw at the NYPL earlier this summer, All American Sunset, Jerry Uelsmann (1971).

What is more all American than a Cubano or a Media Noche?

Magic Sand Castles

Coincidence of reading The Magic Mountain and visiting Watch Hill on a foggy morning.

It's easy to connect the beach chairs set out for the well-heeled (or well flip-flopped) guests at the Ocean House with the common lounging area at Dr. Behren's Berghof sanatorium.

But what to make of Taylor Swift in her cliffside manse? A Hans Castorp for our times, wearing her emotions on her sleeve? Easier to imagine her as Clavdia Chauchat, the object of Hans' intense emotions, in "the lace peignoir that she wore on warm days and that only added to her special fascination--late as always, slamming the door, smiling, both arms lifted slightly at different angles, standing there at attention to present herself to the dining hall."

Taylor Swift's flag

Whatever the case, how could a flatlander ever understand what life is like for those "up there"?