Letter from the West Village
Jean-Claude's House
Waking at dawn at Jean-Claude’s is like waking in a conte-crayon drawing: the buildings all brown & burnt sienna & repeated In the cool pale-charcoal water. This NYC is as close to Europe as I’ll get this year & in the summer heat it feels like Rome. I sat at a sidewalk table yesterday and drank an iced espresso in a glass made for champagne or something.
So now I am watching some kind of pleasure boat ply Its way south toward the harbor, and hearing the gulls cry in the distance. Last night even up here on the sixteenth floor I cd hear hundreds of birds at sunset. And earlier, on Hudson Street, one raven calling for the longest time for its mate. I heard him / her first & then spotted high on chimneys. Stayed a bit on one & then moved to another spot, restless as New Yorkers. I watched a couple of them (New Yorkers, that is) hear her, but not quite register what they’d heard. Such a distinctive & passionate sound!
I mentally sent greetings to them, the one I could see and the missing mate, from their brethren In San Francisco, & told them they did indeed still rule the world as they suspected, and everywhere kids were being wheeled home from day-care in their strollers & grown-ups were stopping in their office garb to buy some kind of readymade dinner & the ravens shouted the news of space and mating, and the Dance between the two.
Page(s) 27
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The