Work In Progress

When I was unemployed and living in Ditmas Park, there was a coffee shop called Vox Pop on Cortelyou Road that became my home-away-from home, where I could sit and job search, commiserate with other neighborhood creatives and write uninterrupted for long stretches of time.

That winter was hard. I remember feeling as if it would never lift—not just the weather, but the mood. No job. No relationship. No home that I could really settle into. And yet, without the distraction of those things, the tiniest bits of life were suddenly noticeable to me. There's a line scribbled in a journal from that time,  "snowflakes fall, one by one, as if they know just where they are going to rest." Closing my eyes, I can remember exactly what the coffee shop looked and felt like on that day. Based on that, a work-in-progress for Wednesday. Feedback most welcome.

01.19.09

Warm soft light and a tree of white feathers
Under a thousand paper cranes I sit
As snow swirls like glitter shaken in a globe
The breath catches in my throat as I am
Captivated by the beauty of it all
The hush of a faraway guitar
The sad smiling eyes of JFK gazing down over the bar
I have seen the past and it is the future
I am in the moment and already it is gone

Beauty is terror, Plato said
I feel full with the fear of having seen it all
of never seeing anything so beautiful again
This must be what it’s like to live underwater
to exist in the deep midnight swirl where a pinpoint of light registers
but is too far away to reach
This is what we call hope—
a bubble on the surface
A snowflake coming to rest on the edge of a bench
it is in the tiniest bits of nature that grace is made evident
in the unimportant moments that the magnitude of life is revealed