Seasons

Three passages from my books about the changes we experience as we grow and age, through the seasons, from spring to summer wine to fall and winter (w)rapture. Prose to accompany photos I took over the years in Manhattan, New York City.

_{Eighth Avenue looking south from West 46th Street}

From Community:

Whenever I walk down the avenue, and it’s quiet like this, I hear a sound like a river or a loving sigh, a song like a dream, music of the dawn of an era and its end. And how the area is filled with people from across America and the world, singers, dancers, actors, cabdrivers, ushers, senators, sailors, lovers, fighters, dreamers, re-filling these tenements and churches and temples and schools, and in the end, the world comes around.

_{Ninth Avenue at West 44th Street looking southeast. This view of the Empire State Building is blocked now by development on West 42nd Street. The original photo is lost apparently; this one was in my newspaper.}

From Passages:

Years ago, I was waiting for the sun. I’ve found it now, thrown myself into its aura. In daylight, the city is awash with steam and grit, waves of alarm and subterranean booms, bones in the soft crushing crowds, metal gliding and banging against sudden turns, all carrying me along, a willing cork in turbulence.

On another plane, the city unfolds as a spiraled lotus, enticing me into its petaled paths toward new vistas and seemingly infinite realms.

I’m in the vortex of the “crossroads of the world.” Midtown Manhattan splays light, white hot, ruthless, spurring us on. Multi-tiered buildings promise many directions, redirections.

As darkness falls, a change in design. Shadow and light, revolving signs, blinking messages. Mischief, dreams, endless interaction. And a change in timbre. Sweat cools but heat remains, passion finds its channels. The lotus in shadow and light, revolving.

And rising neon and fluorescent, the midnight sun of Times Square.

From Into The Fire:

_{West 46th Street past Ninth Avenue, St. Clement’s Church on the right with green spire, January 1996}

Miles to go, miles of snow, a transfigured night and all in sight covered in a winding sheet of white. Stopping at a snowy Ninth Avenue, face and hands wrapped against the wind, my poetic license in the back pocket of my blue jeans, I contemplated the divide before me.

The city streets were deserted, and I was alone in the canyoned silence. Ice-crystals glittered in streetlights, snow camel-backed cars and fenced sidewalks. On the avenue’s arctic slope, deep within the haunting sound of a muted city I could hear gypsy cabs snorting dragon-breath in the dark, and I would have stayed to watch fringes of icicles on fire escapes glow in the dying light.

🙂 But I had promises to keep.

Happy Summer! See you in July.