Just a block away, a pebbled beach the color of stale bread and broken oyster shells, where students come to smoke or drink beer. People walk their dogs there, push children in strollers. At the corner, sometimes the retired professor comes out of his house to divide the woodbine from the wild- flowers or trim the grass. Turning into 49th from the boulevard, you can see ships make their crossing. One of the art history teachers in the college says, if you speed up you get a little lesson in perspective: the Lego bricks they seem to be carrying are containers marked Maersk or Hapag-Lloyd. There's active commerce in the world again, though not far from here, a street named Quarantine reminds us of other deadly periods of pandemic. People are eating again in restaurants, coming back from Iceland or Greece. Once, we dreamed of walking that road of pilgrimage going through cities like San Sebastian and Bilbao. The world is so close sometimes. But we've come to understand the quiet in the yard, even on the hottest days of summer. The stones shimmer, each giving off their own mirage.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
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