thispresentsojourn

When I called Manhattan a home, I often walked-for-walking’s-sake the space separating 97th and Madison Ave from 91st and 2nd. The first time I took the walk, I discovered a quiet little park below the brownstones [or what’s left of them], bordered by green benches, ornate with a multi-colored brickway.

Marked off by a little playground whose air was always richly saturated by the joyscreams of children, the park sits on the Eastern the side of Carnegie Hill, which has it slanting at a steep grade for nearly a half-mile down to the river. If you ever make it all the way down the watershed, you can see clearly Roosevelt Island and the Promise it no longer represents.

The first time I stopped at the 91st Street Park, I marked off the third bench just east of 2nd Avenue as my own. I grew to cherish the spot, taking myself there some weeks all seven nights to read beneath the orange glow of Upper East Side’s streetlamps. It was there that I met John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and J.H. Yoder. And it is there that Franz Wright first introduced me to the holistic Gospel.

In the world you have affliction;
but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.

Ancticipating the considerable void I’d feel upon my departure from Manhattan, I was determined to find a park which met the same needs as did 91st’s. Relentless as I was, I quickly discovered that Skillman Road hosts a pleasant little spot at its far east end.

Directly in its center sits a baseball field, where, during the summer, leagues of young professionals drink pitchers of beer while somehow still maintaining enough motor-skill to hit home runs. Driving by in the night, the lights over the field serve as an icon of my time with baseball, which is itself an icon of the time when I first came to the important realization about exactly how valuable my relationship is with my father.

At each of the four corners of the Skillman’s square park sits an old oak tree. Every tree spreads wide and sturdy from the number of Latino families who’ve decorated, for multiple generations, the low-leaning branches each Sunday afternoon. It is patient Patience here, and, same as it was with “my” spot just East of 2nd Avenue, I’m able to go there with the certainty that worry won’t thicken the air.

How can you live
Far away?
This is my home
and it’s easier to see
From far away.

Tonight,
I’ll Be
Backyarding
For the Last [Saturday]
Time with Ellsworth.

The transaction is paled
Hope, hurt or an ex-
change among the Three

Aprils see to it that
A Pelican’s lift, then, borrow
Past the surface of the pool
[Filled by reticence and Hats]

Punctures the mossy solution,
round ripples dilate, traveling pulses
full of Direction violently
erupt at the pond’s edge.

I am only twenty-three
lives old, and they say you get more.
but remembering really is the only knowing

and Three ago [or for the twentieth Time]
Did I bind to this sense which swallows the spine;

Again, an invertebrate fast to the trim of a lake
whose foamy ridges never repeat.
And of the pattern- Change assigns itself.

A tributary from Williamson to its Ozark kin
The spider veined earth: chartreuse root of
a greater Body.

Reflected on the silver
stillness of the stream:

I am belted to the yellow chair in the center of a room
while looking in with her

And I am only twenty-three
lives old,

But that night we banged at the plexiglass
when an ocean filled the room
and a Pelican dipped from above.