Dear Neighbor

At home it's free-range chickens, here in Cobble Hill pocket park it's speckled starlings marching about and pecking through brittle dry leaves. I'm seated on a bench that faces a sloped oval green, discreetly fenced against active use with a wreath (that starlings ignore) of low posts strung with a black iron chain. It's surrounded by, in concentric layers, a paved path, fringe of trees, shade-planted borders, and a charming pastel mews on one side and brownstoned side street on another. The mounded elliptical center is open - an "earth's eye" facing the sky, blue today. Up top along the slitted center is a flower bed filled with pink and fuschia roses, a fountain of purple buddleia, and frothy sprays of spider cleome. Now and then a pigeon soars, sturdy yet graceful in flight. An old man leans over the crescented chain and spits on the lawn. Brooklyn is a borough of spitters, the whole city, probably. A ball-capped man walks two leashed dogs. A little boy wearing a Nascar tee runs by me along the looped path. Now the spitter is doing tai chi. Mature stands of trees shade the little park. I'm seated beneath a majestic old tree I don't know the name of, and there are honey locusts too, backlit tangles of black wood and lime ovoid leaves. The little boy runs past me again and into the waiting arms of his father who bends down to kiss him adoringly. The BQE, a couple of blocks west, sounds a constant background thrum. On Clinton Street traffic is light, an occasional car edging quietly past.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and had trouble falling back asleep. So I got up, went to the tiny study, and sat naked in the darkness before the glowing Mac. (I may not, on this visit to the Big Apple, be getting myself out quite as much as I ought - but I am catching up on culture in other ways, taking advantage of high-speed internet.) Listened to a narrated slide show review of visionary paintings by Charles Burchfield, in contemplation of a possible visit to the Whitney. Played Stella the Artist and The Bringdown, luxuriously on demand. Watched a charming short documentary about two men who met years ago when they became friendly rivals for the same girl's affection. Each had nurtured artistic aspirations and longed for escape. Many years later, after lifetimes spent in happy, self-imposed exile - one amidst Paris' meandering routes - and in fulfillment of their dreams (they had become writers) they were meeting now to revisit in bittersweet fashion the impoverished, bleak, bombed-out, remarkably unchanged Bronx hardscape of their youth.

Watched another video, of another writer, that was reminiscent of (or was) a miniature dramatic monologue. He described his book and explained how in writing it he had allowed himself to follow his intuition, seeing where the gilded birds might take him, trusting in the connections that might form. All the while he spoke, in flowing associative prose, his hands in parallel expression would come together; fly apart; poise in midair, fingers elongated; take flight, his corporeal hands like birds themselves, legible of spirit, that in a certain light might leave eloquent fluttering shadows on a wall.

***
I wasn't the only one with insomnia last night. This morning as I left the brownstone for my stroll to the park, on the floor of the vestibule lay a single lined sheet of paper with a handwritten note inscribed to "Dear Neighbor" from "your neighbor." The note complained of a wind chime that "unfortunately causes an unusually loud sound that echoes," losing no time to play the "especially as we have children" card - who "cannot sleep due to its sound." The note with professional, faux-polite alacrity recommended the only acceptable solution: "would you be so kind as to take it down?"

Unfortunately also, I'm afraid the wind chime belongs to the people in whose apartment I'm staying. (I remember freezing nights last winter listening in fascination to the bleak unseasonal clangs outside their fire escape, clamorous paean to lost birds that had missed the migration south.) I'll have to email them to see what, if anything, they'd like me to do. Always tiresome conflicts such as this in the city -- wind chimes? Of all the noises and offenses the city has to serve up - this is the one that prompts a trip around the corner to deliver an anonymous note?

Fall is coming and soon windows all over will be shut tight, cedars will dance and reach for one another in rough winds, and chimes will clang in mad, ferocious choral accompaniment, all through the overly bright starless nights.

Did I say clang? No dearest, I mean, beautifully, sonorously, soothingly, blendingly sound into the snow flakes of a soft winter night dropping over the ledges onto the BQE or the Cross-Bronx or whatever as I lie here dreaming of shimmering hummingbirds...