The world moves so quickly here. Even as I sit quietly in this basement living room, listening to the small sounds--fat raindrops bouncing off the walkway, the creak of wet leaves beside the back door--even as I sit here quietly, the buses, ambulances, trucks, cabs, subways, airplanes are rushing, hissing, groaning, shrieking. Yesterday, in Bryant Park, I read a section of "The White Bear," and meanwhile all around me jugglers were juggling and men were sleeping at tables and women were chasing toddlers and hula hoopers were prancing through the grass and construction machines were banging and horns were honking, and meanwhile the poem coiled through a secret wet forest where animals spoke and parents wept and the water well was lined with gold.

my life held precariously in the seeing

hands of others, their and my impossibilities.

     --Frank O'Hara, "Poem," 1956