New York City Field Notes: Spring 2020


While you stayed home, the cherry trees
I passed at the reservoir mid-March
were in early bud, the blooms pink dabs

wrapped in green and brown. A week later
they’d opened, full branches against sky.
One April day I saw them so heavily in bloom

they almost touched above the bridle path
passing the Guggenheim, whose ground floor
windows were pink-lit too, as, across the reservoir

windows of West Side buildings caught light,
silvery that overcast morning, not sunrise gold.
No walkers touched under the canopy of branches.

Instead we zigzagged through six feet apart.
A few days afterward, the cherry trees turned white,
bridal, as if to celebrate their joining. When I

passed next, fallen petals had carpeted the path,
covered its dirt, as if leading us to a party, as if we
solitary walkers were guests at a celebration.

And I tell you this, so we might ponder it,
all of it: nature’s un-resting forward drive,
the trees almost meeting, how this year I saw it,

how this year I looked up, how this year
I could see on those repetitive, solitary walks
how cherry blooms change in time, just blocks below

the peaked white tents of a temporary field hospital,
carried world-wide to hot spots, raised in Central Park,
how back on the West Side, almost home, I saw

the sweet-gum trees had dropped their spiky seed
pods to the ground, where, big as golf balls, they
scattered like viruses, ready to touch and cling.