Poetry Saturday: Molly Peacock

Among Tall Buildings

from the collection Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002)

And nothing, not even the girl you love
with the mole on her arm, will be left. Huge
trenches will be dug just beyond the stove
the whole northeast corridor will become
and the dead will be piled in each rude gouge,
even that girl whose left ear always sticks
slightly out beyond her hair. To fix
the names of who died on tape won’t be done
since they’ll dig quick to prevent disease. Nobody
likes to hear this kind of talk. I always
hated to hear it myself until I began
loving the mortar between blocks, that cruddy
pocked cement holding up buildings so a man
and a woman can embrace in the maze
of what they’ve built on the errors of their ways.

---

Molly Peacock is the author of How To Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle (1999) as well as a memoir, Paradise Piece by Piece (1998). Former President of the Poetry Society of America, she was one of the originators of Poetry in Motion, which placed poems on subways and buses. A more complete biography can be found on the Poetry Foundation website.

Sentence of the Day: Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Two people on the New York Subway. Self was beginning to think this was a rom-com, until:

For sixty years, we sat in that car, just barely pretending not to notice each other.

— Missed Connection — m4w, Story # 4 in Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory

Pain!!!

Life

We subleased a studio on Broadway and spent eight weeks doing very little other than exactly what we wanted to do, which is to say a lot of drinking coffee, eating waffles, taking long walks around the reservoir up and down Riverside Park and reading magazines cover to cover in the bath.

— Asymmetry, p. 177

Asymmetry, p. 119

Alice and Ezra’s relationship seems so exhausting.

Their relationship is only possible because Alice is so very young, a real ingénue, like her namesake Alice in Wonderland.

She had once counted twenty-seven different pill dispensers in that bathroom, vials with science-fiction names from Atropine to Zantac and a barrage of exclamatory imperatives: TAKE ONE TABLET DAILY OR EVERY SIX TO EIGHT HOURS AS NEEDED. TAKE ONE TABLET BY MOUTH AT BEDTIME FOR ONE MONTH THEN INCREASE BY 1 TABLET EACH MONTH UNTIL TAKING 4 TABLETS. TAKE 2 CAPSULES NOW THEN 1 CAPSULE EVERY 8 HOURS TILL GONE. ONE TABLET WITH A GLASS OF WATER ONCE A DAY. TAKE WITH FOOD. AVOID EATING GRAPEFRUIT OR DRINKING GRAPEFRUIT JUICE WITH THIS MEDICINE. DO NOT TAKE ASPIRIN OR PRODUCTS CONTAINING ASPIRIN WITHOUT THE KNOWLEDGE AND CONSENT OF YOUR PHYSICIAN. KEEP IN THE REFRIGERATOR AND SHAKE WALL BEFORE USING. USE CAUTION WHEN OPERATING A CAR. AVOID THE USE OF A SUNLAMP. DO NOT FREEZE. PROTECT FROM LIGHT. PROTECT FROM LIGHT AND MOISTURE. DISPENSE IN A TIGHT, LIGHT-RESISTANT CONTAINER. DRINK PLENTY OF WATER. SWALLOW WHOLE. DO NOT SHARE WITH ANYONE . . .

Self doesn’t know a single writer (and she knows many) who can afford this many prescriptions, even with medical insurance covering 80%.

Self wishes Alice would go off and find a man close to her age who doesn’t need to be taken care of.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Sentence of the Day: ASYMMETRY, by Lisa Halliday

Now that his book was done, a number of deferred medical matters could be addressed, including a colonoscopy, a prostate screening, and some tests a pulmonologist had recommended to investigate a recent shortness of breath.

— Asymmetry, p. 67

Very much enjoying this collection of novellas. The first one, Folly, reads a bit like Francoise Sagan, if Aimez vous Brahms were set in Manhattan.

Another sentence:

Considerations complicated by this maddening habit of wanting something only until she’d got it, at which point she wanted something else.

Stay tuned.

Seals of New York

Pack rat self. She clipped an article from The New Yorker of 21 March 2011 and kept it tucked away in a drawer. Until today, when self found it again. She kept only one page, so she doesn’t know who the author of the piece is.

In 1993, Kevin Walsh, of the New York Aquarium, said there was a harbor seal living under the Williamsburg Bridge. In ’97, Sieswerda reported that occasional seals could be spotted on out-of-the-way beaches in Brooklyn and Queens. In 2001, kayakers said that they saw about a dozen harbor seals living on Swinburne Island, in the Lower Harbor, two and a half miles from the Verrazano Bridge.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Nostalgia: New York City

Self loves As Lie Is To Grin when the narrator simply describes what he sees as he moves about New York City:

I exited the station at West Eighth Street, heading north, and stood on a traffic island, watching small plane lights appear in the darkness behind One World Trade Center.

She would love to have this book as a walking guide when she is actually in New York City, a city that is dear to her heart because that is where her parents met: her father was a law student at Georgetown, and her mother was a classical pianist who had given concerts at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher. Painfully, that is also where her older sister died, so many years ago.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

SCALE: The Daily Post Photo Challenge, 11 October 2017

Very interesting challenge from The Daily Post this week!

SCALE

Photography ” . . .  is all about perspective, where and how you place other objects in the frame . . . ” — Erica V., The Daily Post

Here are some examples of SCALE: (1) at the Louvre, in front of the Mona Lisa (2) in Bath’s Royal Crescent, the entrance to Royal Crescent # 1 and (3) in New York’s Russian Tea Room, next to Carnegie Hall. Self’s first trip to New York City was with Dearest Mum, who once played at Carnegie Hall. This September, she took Dearest Mum, who’s now past 80, for lunch at the Russian Tea Room. We had the best time.

The Louvre, May 2017

Royal Crescent No. 1 (Royal Crescent Museum), Bath

The Russian Tea Room, 57th St., New York City (Next to Carnegie Hall): Dearest Mum took self here, her first time in New York City, decades ago. The place hasn’t changed a bit.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

PEDESTRIANS 2: Iconic, 2017

There’s a theme to the photographs here, self’s second post on The Daily Post’s Photo Challenge of the week, PEDESTRIANS.

• The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City:

• The Atrium, Robert Lehman Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City:

• London Eye, South Bank:

 

 

 

Pedestrian: New York City, Claremont, Sacramento

This week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge is PEDESTRIAN:

• What does PEDESTRIAN mean to you? Perhaps this is a great chance to go out and practice some street photography.

— Krista Stevens, The Daily Post

So, here are three street scenes. They’re not the greatest, but they certainly were street:

New York City: September 2017

Jennie, Son, and Self in the Claremont, CA Farmers Market: July 2017

Downtown Sacramento, CA: July 2017