Sun Struck

82nd St. station platform, 6 P.M., Monday, August 25. Finally, summer.

For the Delights

Is it possible our summer series, In Poetry Motion, has yet to include an Emily Dickinson entry? But which one might speak to New Yorkers on their way to work or school, to play or pray? How about a little apartment hunting?

Julio Cortazar (from Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

Too few the mornings be,

Too scant the nights.

No lodging can be had

For the delights

That come to earth to stay,

But no apartment find

And ride away.

International Star

Subway poems give way to subway realities. Or subway opportunities. Photo opportunities, that is.

Tourists flock to the platform's edge to photograph a rat on the tracks.

Caves of the Cavemen

The subway station
with its electric lights, pillars of steel, arches of cement,
   and trains -
quite an improvement on the caves of the cavemen;
but look! on this wall
a primitive drawing.

An underground gem from Charles Reznikoff's "Going To and From and Walking Up and Down," published in the collection By the Waters of Manhattan. I first encountered this book, and this poet, many years ago in a bookstore in Warsaw bookstore that maintained a shelf of highly miscellaneous used English- language books. I bought if for the cover alone--a design by Gilda Kuhlman, featuring her grainy photograph of the East River and East Side Drive (little knowing my beat would be the other side of the river).

Inside, Reznikoff's meditations on quotidian New York City life read as precursors to Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems--only, you know, Jewish.

Lion Daze

Lion Head, Bernard Langlais

One of Philip Larkin's many poems that celebrate the seasons, "Long Lion Days" is about the kind of day we haven't had many (or any?) of this summer, at least in New York.

Long lion days
Start with white haze.
By midday you meet
A hammer of heat -
Whatever was sown
Now fully grown,
Whatever conceived
Now fully leaved,
Abounding, ablaze -
O long lion days.

Perhaps it's not too late?

Perlita

There aren't many bars with a courtyard overlooking the BQE. Perlita in Woodside seems to be staking out one. It's not clear what the lifejackets signify...

but I'd hate to be a man overboard here.

Crossing to Newark

New Jersey Turnpike from a Newark-bound NJ Transit train.