//creative//
Spring 2018
On 74th Street
Lena Rubin
a procession of practitioners & devotees & flower-lovers
passes by the theater and the mega-supermarket. Bird-scores swing thru the air.
On the Hudson, the train moves through the fog & into the glittering river
past the waste treatment plant and the abandoned, cerulean sugar factory.
At 4:22, the lightest layer of fog still hugs river’s horizon.
The clouds are loose like gesticulating hands, and the river is dark-Atlantic.
How beautiful, how perfect without any prior knowledge of perfection
or of anything but being as it is.
Waking up in increments that morning each circle
of dreams brought me deeper and deeper.
A child was born capable of reading, writing & speaking.
He had written a sentence in French on a piece of paper; he showed it to me.
“La lune entière. What does it mean?’
“Le monde entier,” he clarified. I had misread.
Time then for me to go. Back onto 74th, I crossed onto Amsterdam thinking
what a long summer: it’s only mid-July.
The entire moon.
The entire world.
--
* “the entire moon”
** “the entire world”
//LENA RUBIN is a senior in Barnard College. She can be reached at lrr2145@barnard.edu.