Recent BK
In the opening essay of When I Was a Child I Wrote Books, Marilynne Robinson writes of the miraculous improbability that is every human being: each mind containing more neurons than stars in our universe, arranged in patterns complicated beyond our reckoning, loving and hurting and thinking, floating through a vast vacuum gulf; if from a certain scale even a chair would look like a cloud of energy, what might each of us appear to be….
I hadn’t planned to watch the New York City Marathon but was caught on the far side of Bedford Avenue, separated from my house by the runners, and fortunately so. Having only watched the highly competitive runners before, those at the front of the pack, rather than the great mass in the middle, I had not realized that the marathon is an allegory: The elites, beautiful as they are with long strides and holy focus, are an outlying fringe, like Broadway actors introducing a community theatre. Everyone else is — everyone else.
Atlantic Ocean sensations: A high, clear astringency; golden-toned and defiant; bunchgrass perseverance, slate, the mercy of wind and sand. Continue reading
Images from the great, terrible, destroyed, verdant urban wilderness of Jamaica Bay. Continue reading
Late in June, within a space of several acres. Ubiquitous, ephemeral, as magnificent as any Pollock. Continue reading
On the corner of Willoughby & Nostrand, a school closed due to cephalopod (one wishes). Continue reading
At the bottom of Alton Bog is an ancient silt seabed; atop that, ten thousand years of vegetal remains, raising the bog’s center above the surrounding wetlands. The soil is acidic, infertile, hypoxic; plants receive only what nourishment falls from the sky, and trees standing a few feet tall can be hundreds of years old. Continue reading