Farewell!

I have had such a good time maintaining this blog over the past (almost) two years. But I find myself flagging, less because I have nothing to say than that I've found new ways to say it. In many cases, this saying involves really going out and talking to people in North Brooklyn and the wider world. In others instances, it requires tying myself to a chair and hitting my mind against words...which is to say, working on poems. In all cases, my commitment to the dialogue has not languished so much as my resolve to post conversations to the void. So, dear void, I end as I began (but with a new image, one recently pulled off the pavement at the corner of Lorimer and Withers):

My Community is Under the BQE and on either side of it, with Williamsburg to the south and Greenpoint to the north. I'm on the edge where streets that have been running nearly east-west tilt to run northwest-southeast, all the way to the East River. My community is changing like a prairie on fire, but that's okay. I'm not here to decry the new but to bear witness to the amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience of living in a New York City neighborhood that is changing faster than probably any other neighborhood (at least visibly) and which has a once-in-a-city experience to transform its skyscape in a short period of time. We who live here now will never again see as much sky as we do now, or as the Italians who've been on my street for decades or the Polish who've been on Nassau for decades or the artists who've been on Bedford since the 80s saw even before the Changes started happening. We're all blessed, in this little corner of the world, on this little pinhead of time. One of my favorite poets writes,

"How wondrous strange it was at that moment
to be in the flesh."

And it is.

Deck the Streets

Notes on December

It's unseasonably warm outside (perhaps the most dispiriting weather of all), but I'm listening to Christmas carols (from the time before "Greensleeves" was "What Child is This?"), and I just was outside walking by Union Pool, which smelled of childhood campfires (ode to the amygdala!). Related to this: basmati rice smells like popcorn, cats smell like cats, and a nearby candle could be a very sweet and waxy apple pie.

Poem Interlude

Crown Heights

The bells were made
of November or it might
have been the other way
around. Perhaps both were
merely points on a spectrum
of yellow, as the tree on your
street, which, more than
anything, turned love into
something we could see.