Enjoying New York City

I've just returned from three weeks in Poland and am in NYC with my dear friend and fellow poet, Mary Ann Mayer. We have walked from Midtown to Lower Manhattan over the past two days--despite my jet lag from Krakow to Munich to New York. The summer city is hot, vibrant, alive with energy and people, a beautiful and gritty melange of humanity's relationships and creation. We visited Aperture Photography Gallery today and cruised around Manhattan on a boat. Cool and fun on the water!

I am working on a post on my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but am letting that experience stew and ripen a bit before I share it.

My dreams upon return to the United States are filled with images and the traumas of history as I experienced them vicariously in Poland. Probably it will be a lifetime of integration and thinking about the travels there and those travels will influence and direct my critical and creative writing in many ways.

I return home as a post-doctoral student of life. A new phase after graduate school begins and I anticipate new poems, new essays, and continued conversations with others that enrich and deepen life and thinking. I hope you will all follow my blog as I continue to post short essays, poems, and ideas and photos here.

On the boat around Manhattan.

Brooklyn Bridge and Freedom Tower in the background.

Lower Manhattan. Trade Towers gone, the new Freedom Tower in their place.

Walking the High Line--an old railroad that delivered milk, meat, and other  goods in Manhattan.
Now a beautiful park and elevated garden over the city from 30th Street to 14th Street.