- Not much time to wander yesterday, up 1st to 80th, south on 2nd, then took the tram to Roosevelt Island then back again, dinner, Thai, decent not great, hotel, sleep.
- Our room in the Teekman Bowers does not have a chair, Earthgirl inadvertently booked one of the ADA rooms in the hotel, gigantic wheelchair accessible bathroom though, I type in the conference room of the hotel this morning.
- Today walk Earthgirl to her workshop on 57th then go to MOMA then Central Park, discs in backpack, tentative plan, I may get to her workshop on 57th then do something else, I'll decide when decision needs made, meet Earthgirl on 57th after workshop, walk south to Greenwich Village to dinner.
- Roosevelt Island, new luxury apartments, rentals, condos, I can understand wanting to live there, I can understand not.
- Selfie, Roosevelt Island Tram west platform, 59th and 2nd, last night:
- Solitudo.
- How many poets does it take to screw in a light bulb?
- Where is our absurd?
- At the ramparts of the human.
- Spectrums of debility and resistance.
- The joy of evil.
- Seeing decline.
- Random Barking Friday.
- Manhattan from Roosevelt Island:
BASEBALL DAYS
Peter Balakian
All summer the patio drifted in and out of light the color of margarine;
days were blue, not always sky blue.
At night the word Algeria circulated among the grown-ups.
A patient of my father had whooping cough, the words drifted into
summer blue. The evenings spun into stadium lights.
Kennedy’s hair blew across the screen. Castro was just a sofa.
I saw James Meredith’s face through a spread of leaves
on the evening news. The fridge sweat with orangeade,
the trees whooped some nights in rain—
a kid down the street kept coughing into his mitt.
Static sounds from Comiskey and Fenway came
though the vinyl, the plastic, the pillow—
So when it left Stallard’s hand, when Roger Maris’s arms whipped
the bat and the bullet-arc carried into the chasm the disaffections
at 344 ft. near the bullpen fence
under the green girder holding up the voices rising into the façade and over the
river
where a Baptist choir on Lenox Ave. was sending up a variation of Sweet Chariot
into the traffic on the FDR that was jammed at the Triboro
where a derrick was broken and the cables of its arms picked up the star-blast of
voices coming over the Stadium façade spilling down the black next-game
sign into the vector
of a tilted Coke bottle on a billboard
at the edge of the river where a cloud of pigeons rose over Roosevelt Island.
It was evening by the time the cars unjammed and the green of the outfield unfroze
and the white arc had faded into skyline before fall came
full of boys throwing themselves onto the turf with inexplicable desire
for the thing promised. The going. Then gone.
