From the West Side Highway, around Houston Street, you may be startled to glimpse trapeze artists soaring in the sky. If you're curious about the Trapeze School, you may venture into Pier 40, which was once used only as a vast outdoor car-park. The cars are still there, and in addition, two full-size ball fields (football and soccer) with grandstands, and a field of Astroturf where gymnasts and cheerleaders can jump about like grasshoppers. You can watch, close up, people jackknife through the air. There are views all the way around (the River north and south alive with boats, ships, barges); New Jersey to the west; Manhattan to the north, south and east). The vicinity between Houston and Canal is still partially derelict, with some of the few remaining buildings of mysterious decrepitude: a long-abandoned diner (like a place in a horror flick), the strange Dept. of Street Cleaning and the Ventilation Building; weed-wild lots inside chain-link; ungentrified warehouses; and, incongruously, a patio with a telltale red umbrella, wedged behind some scaffolding. . . .

Walking home late in the evening, I was startled by the twin blue beams, like ghosts of the Towers, raking the sky, accompanied by the moon. My camera couldn't capture those spectral lights, but a man passing by got the image on his cell phone and generously offered to email it to me. Thank you, Mr. Todd Finger! Nice to have met you!

My sister Linda and I just painted a mural in the dog spa of a condo in Soho. There are portraits of 29 dogs that live in the building. The last image, our signature, is of our own Shorty, Caleb and Tracy.

The sky of tress-tousled clouds declines
above a backdrop of geometric overlays
on the silver river and a pier incomplete.
Through binoculars I can read the sign
on the guard shack and see the hunched
guard within, all those stories down.
The lenses sweep back and forth along
the ancient stage of the downtown street
where shadowy men pass before my gaze,
strophe and antistrophe. Afloat through time
they mime foibles and lapses, in postures
of lassitude and rote distraction, enact
the human condition with current props:
cell phones, palm pilots, Ipods, laptops.
Relieved from work the men hurry from
offices toward pleasure, making plans,
reciting directions into tiny devices.
Slowly I pan upward, training the lenses
on the close blaze of noiseless waves,
the darkening coastline, illegible smudges
of ferries and barges, to the silent shock
of a sail blade at my throat.

*

AWESOME AND RISIBLE VISIBLES

1. Man and upended racing bike emerging from a Port-o-San
2. Fat bulldog sitting on bench while owner runs around dog run
3. Cairn terrier scaling 6-foot stone wall to greet canine friends
4. Man fishing on the North Lawn in Rockefeller Park
5. Wild turkey strolling in Battery Park
6. Summer skies
7. Half moon
8. Full moon

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.

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"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. " --Kafka

"...I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole..." -- Czeslaw Milosz

“Do not become bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths, all becomes law.” - Rilke

To be alone
It is a color that
Cannot be named:
This mountain where cedars rise
Into the autumn dusk -- Jakuren, 12th century

"… do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." - Romans 12:2

My heart has become able
To take on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
For monks, an abbey. -- Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240)

"What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event - the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather." -- Melville, Pierre

~

“We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.” – Michel de Montaigne
~
“All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)” --Gerard Manley Hopkins
~
“Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within yourself.” – Rainer Maria Rilke [cf. Whitman, “I loafe and invite my soul.”]
~
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Emerson
~
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” -- Whitman
~
“In life, never do as others do…. either do nothing, just go to school, or do something nobody else does.” --Gurdjieff’s grandmother to him, on her deathbed. -- Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
~
“But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!” – Jack Kerouac
~
“Y’know the real world, this so-called real world,
It’s just something you put up with, like everybody else.
I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world.
Then I’m in the real world – I’m on the beam.
Because when I’m falling, I’m doing all right;
When I’m slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!
It’s not when I’m standing upright that bothers me;
I’m not doing so good; I’m stiff.
As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping
Most of the time, into that glimpse.
I’m like a slipping glimpser.
--Willem de Kooning

This morning, on the first full day of summer, the river is glassy, quiescent, dimpled like cellulite. Its pattern is deceptively simple, etched with thumbprint whorls and nearly invisible rings that come and go, imminent and transcendent, from surfacing fish or unseen insects or something else.

In the distance: a barge with a tug, like a nuzzling cow and calf.

At the North Cove marina, the Ventura is about to leave for a trip up the Hudson, to Tarrytown. On the floating gangway, Patrick (“Captain Pat”) Harris, the owner of the sloop, comes over to pet the dogs.

He says people can bring their pets for a sail anytime, for an extra dollar each (www.sailnewyork.com, 212-786-1204). Why leave the family at home? he smiles. With all his passengers aboard, he returns to the yacht and the boat casts off.

As the Ventura slides out of the marina, a mate at the bow blows on a conch, the most archangelic sound.