I AM more than a tourist, here (#NYC)

Photo: Mat McDermitt

ghosts of yesterday's trains, all bodies moving at once from stop to stop, are the wind in our hair, easy curl & hawk, as we walk the High Line which runs along the west above the rush of city streets. toeing rust brown tracks that divide concrete walkways, tracks reclaimed when faced with destruction to create green space---plants, trees, flowers that cut between brick steel & glass, where old meets new & chrome meets color.

below us, burrowed in studios, artists are busy in their own creating, re-imagining tin, bent steel bumpers, canvas, clay---with hammers, with paintbrushes & acetylyne torches---tools in the trade of recycling spin cycle junk no one wants but will pay high dollar for after & there are twenty or so people sitting in a little amphitheatre off the side of the above ground foot path---eating lunch, writing poems, sketching or napping in front of a thirty foot window overlooking---traffic.

a brown upholster suit man in a hat from the fifties lounges on a chaise, shoes off, wiggling his socked toes in the sun before the Hudson where water breaks on old wood pilings in white foam spray. benches rise ergonomically from the path & people sit, talk, play games on their phones or iPods, push strollers. i climb one just to jump off.

there is serenity in the loud silence of hundreds of voices singing to the tune of brake screech back beats, impatient cabbie's play horns, foot steps, foot steps, con-ver-sations. we walk---walk---walk through and around, points of light pausing before a particular tree, green leaves & buds thick before birth.

stroking fine hairs along the skin of these unborn children of spring, we breathe. in a week or three days, another will stop in this same place, press nose to petal, inhale & sigh---but we are full even in the anticipation and empty for the filling.

Continuing my NYC journey from last week. This is from our walk along the High Line, a part of NYC i had never seen, but would put it among my favorites now. Linking in with Poetry Jam.