"This is the hour for strange effects in light and shade – enough to make a colorist go delirious – long spokes of molten silver sent horizontally through the trees (now in their brightest tenderest green), each leaf and branch of endless foliage a lit-up miracle..." Whitman, from Speciman Days






9/24


Porta Bella


All of the city at dawn and beyond but a play of light and shadow as the thousands of high climbing windows glow or conceal, the vestibules burn red along state street by diadems of blinking neon or the timber fixtures of new signs hanging in handmade patterns.  The colorist walks by and listens to all the shades and sees them as but a play orchestrated among edges and curves of what is singing.  As we walk into the courtyard of Porta Bella it is the folded up umbrellas of summer's last tables that now look cold and angered to the rain and wind.  I know of no other crabapple tree that so transforms a miniature landscape, its old root branches reaching out over the stone walk to dark door leading within.  The skyway is open to stars. The red berries sit like handheld lanterns which blink at every passing apparition.