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.

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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

I don’t know if a Platonic ideal of bookstore exists. Maybe one’s tastes are shaped, as with food or love, by first experience. Whatever the case, my original bookstore is my favorite: Lippincott Books, which I first browsed more than twenty years ago, and which will close this month. Continue reading