Link: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda
Enchanting collection of photos from the New Yorker…
I like this one especially…”Immaculate Conception”
When you are a child, you can become anything you want. You have this sparkle about you — I think of the Dust in Pullman’s The Golden Compass. And when you finally grow up, your roles become limited. You can’t play secretary or mother or king in the same day, but you can still let the sparkle you had die hard.
“A person’s heart is like a deep well. Nobody knows what lies at the bottom. We can only imagine what there might be by contemplating the form of the things which, once in a while, come to the surface.”
Haruki Murakami, “Airplane”
6/24/2010
Back on the other side of the ‘charco.’ I was surprised at how nice everyone is here, at the Miami airport. Everytime I arrive I feel the embrace of home like a wave — people who talk like me, who talk to me, who don’t look at me strange, who don’t care about observing the things I do. Comfort in ordering things, buying things, making small talk — finally the way I speak isn’t strange, or foreign, or plagued with errors.
Airplane rides, like they always are — long, drowsy, filled with neck and leg pains, fears of turbulance, views of the world above weather level. A sky filled with cloud castles. Most of the time, you sleep, if lucky. Sometimes you make small talk with your partner, you read, you sleep some more. I don’t know what it is about motion that makes sleep so inevitable. Sometimes you think random thoughts. Or rather they come to you, and you don’t think twice about the memories surfacing, rising to your present mind. You don’t try to remember more or connect them to adjacent memories or give any kind of significance to them. Even though, one day, they may be gone.
Before landing we were served pizza from Chicago’s UNO pizzeria, the deep dish, thick crust kind. And I was thinking about how once there used to be an UNO’s on South Street, right near where the Artful Dodger’s is now. A cute, cozy place with good food. The first time I went there was with Dimitry. I think we might have been looking for a place to eat and happened upon it. We were seated at a small table at the window. I had brought my copy of Interview with the Vampire to lend to him, and we made the moment into a dramatic event. The book was lain on the table, salted over, and passed slowly as we sang the Olympics theme song (it was the only important-sounding melody that had occurred to us then) and we giggled uncontrollably.
The second memory I have of UNO’s is when me and Shane went once (I think this was my first year of college). We had met near City Hall in the pouring rain, and decided to slosh over to South Street. We shared one umbrella (his, I never am prepared for rain) between the two of us, so we each had one side of us soaking wet by the time we arrived. I don’t remember much else — it’s interesting the details that stick and the ones that don’t. And if the other person who shared the same experience doesn’t remember, either, then the details are lost in the well of the heart. They’re there, somewhere, but they won’t surface back up anytime soon.
Poem-A-Day is apparently continuing! And might turn into a year-round thing…fingers crossed. My other favorite poem from April.
Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye
by Gerald Stern
Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel—
you don’t know it—that takes you through the rivers
and under the burning hills. I went there to cry
in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle
through fire and flood. Some have little parks—
San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque
is beautiful from a distance; it is purple
at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,
especially from the little rise on the hill
at 14-C; it has twelve entrances
like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,
has two small floating bridges in front of it
that brought me in and out. I said good-bye
to them both when I was 57. I’m reading
Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time.
I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull
of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye.
He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city
in every sense of the word; he wore a library
across his chest; he had a church on his knees.
I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,
the last true city; after him there were
only overpasses and shopping centers,
little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper
with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf
where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits,
where nobody either lies or runs; either that
or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,
a flower sucking the water out of a rock.
What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores
lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick
turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,
dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left
with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.
I put it in my leather pockets next
to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,
my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there
beside his famous number; there is smoke
and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter
is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting
is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz
goodbye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue;
we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall—I’m shaking now
when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.
mabel lee