from Letters to Jane by Hayden Carruth

It's a brisk morning in New York, high clouds with patches of blue. I've been watching the sea gulls flying among the buildings between Bleecker Street and the Hudson River. From this height it's a little like being at sea, distances are deceiving, and sometimes distance becomes lost altogether so that one has no sense of perspective, and the gulls look like ghosts of gulls or eidolons of some kind, wheeling on a flat mysterious screen. Reality turns into a painting, a work of art. Is this an effect of life in the city, all these rectangular shapes jumbled together? I don't remember anything similar in the country.