"I did not die. I am at your side. Your delusion has come to an end. You are again your true self, in the place where you belong. Your work is waiting."
I
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you
also face fo face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that
cross, returning home, are more curious to me
than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence
are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you
might suppose.
2
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all
hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself
disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of
the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and
hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage
over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me
far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between
me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of
others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore
to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west,
and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross,
the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide,
the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide…
- Walt Whitman
“That house was the most beautiful house I ever saw. Every floor in it was solid walnut and some of them boards was close to three foot wide. All of it hand planed. All of it at the bottom of a lake. I dont know, Bobby. You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life.”
I want to be in rooms full of people I love.
The world goes white then green again
like the mind telling the body it is not alone.
The body saying something I can almost hear
above the sound of a dog barking
because he feels himself tied and tremendously alone.
Who would you believe?
I walk the great streets of New York City
where many great people have lived
and think how great it is to live and die on earth
even if it means having known nothing
of the why. Nothing of the why.
They're sentences in waiting, diagrams drained. Tuesday raises her hand & asks directions to the bathroom. She misses cigarettes, lessons how kissing the boy she drags into the Sadie Hawkins dance keeps her homeliest gal in all them hills. Tuesdays fenced in, clad like tea cozies as though for a parade. A crossing guard & spinster, spent tissues saved & saying how I'm with stupid is a saying for life. Sundown thereafter kicking & kicking. Boys waving from the backseat of a car.
The life of a garment worker in midtown Manhattan.
She worked as seamstress in the sweatshops of New York City.
Whose mother is not the love of their life?
She pushed her lunch on co-workers
from Russia, Togo, Haiti, Dominican Republic.
They disliked the sugar fried anchovies.
They saw the nimbus on each fish
and politely or raucously declined. The cavernous
spaces of her mind. Having studied graphic design
at Duksung Women’s College, Dobong-gu, Seoul,
what else was she going to do but write a novel.
Staring at sea windows, she scrawled and chalked
in her head. Drong of eternal absence. An expert
on the social history of the Staten Island Ferry,
she confided in me the act of crying was a privilege.
What type of person leaves a near full can of
coconut water on the bleachers? You have to be
happy in order to weep, or sob. I can teach you,
she said to me. If you can hold a pencil, I can teach you
how to draw. But I’ve known people who have
no hands. Who have no fingers.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no steps had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost, from Mountain Interval
“…If he had smiled why would he have smiled?
To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.”
- James Joyce, from Ulysses
I saw the country in a light that we usually do not see: the low-slanting rays picked out the foliage of the trees and high-lighted a new wheatfield against the dark curtain of woods on the knobs, which were in shadow.
It was very beautiful. Deep peace. Sheep on the slopes behind the sheep barn. The new trellises in the novitiate garden leaning and sagging under a hill of roses. A cardinal singing suddenly in the walnut tree, and piles of fragrant logs all around the woodshed waiting to be cut in bad weather.
I looked at all this in great tranquility, with my soul and spirit quiet. For me, landscape seems to be important for contemplation. Anyway, I have no scruples about loving it. Didn’t Saint John of the Cross hide himself in a room up in a church tower, where there was one small window through which he could look out at the country?
- Thomas Merton, from The Sign of Jonas
1936 - 2023
Untitled - Eurana Park, Pennsylvania, 1982
Untitled, Mauch Chunk Lake, Jim Thorpe, PA, 2012
Untitled, Eurana Park, Pennsylvania, 1983
Untitled, Eurana Park, Pennsylvania, 1982
Untitled - Children in Neshaminy Creek, 2012