What you don’t see here are the earnest midtown lunchers seeking out a place to sit quietly and feel an hour’s comfort without expectation.  A park on 23rd Street defines itself by its absences, without grass we are able to see the ephemeral network of shadows that leave no mark of the day’s delimmas or joys.

Piet Mondrian
Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-1943)
Oil on canvas
50 x 50 in. (127 x 127 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel, a rete of steel—a radial zigzag; an arced fragment of New York’s subway rete; the red of an otherwise invisible electrical rete; and the window pane made visible by refraction, read by retes of rods, cones, and nerves.

In my hand I hold a leaf from the tree outside my window. Old hand lined now age and experience veins grown larger. Central vein on the leaf stems my palm. Outside under the tree on the playground the shrieks of children poke sounds of traffic near and far. Rumble is the distance away of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Sun is the fenders bending the sound of the city so many sounds at once un-focusing my eyes. Traffic is snarled. I am thirsty. I shut my window thick and everything goes but the light the light pounds away a second at a time, relentless. Everything is connected is a close place is passing is a light through a tree against night and sky. Make a wish a sign a cross across a great distance. That’s the sun that’s the road I take that takes me south in sun back to her.