Manhattan Summer

White dress, languid grass. Popsicles lie here licking ambient music dripping red sugar as far as the day is long. A brown reed draws a permanent marker stripe from her chin to her kenes on her eggshell silk dress, erupting into a cattail-brown flower. Her lover, friend, or otherwise colloquial companion shares this space between her arms on the Washington Square lawn. Children, adults, girls, boys, dogs sprint solicitously through the orbed-fountain, the visitors in their summer informals. No one is a tourist here. Flourescent bikins make an entrace. Breezy kitch and drop-gap curiosity arrives from the artistry of neo-human hipster decoration. "Look over there!" A baker's chocolate-burn: a tall young man in 19th century garb waits for attention, receives it, and proceeds into the falafel house across the street. Rock music rolls out of ice cream vans and violins from Italian restaurants: where is Benito Mussolini when you need him? Veni veno viti. When does one begin to recall Mozart's Austrian organdy of rash ornateness, a genius life shortened by excessive work that bites at the quick of my subconscious youth? A violin conjures Kabbalah demons of Saul Bellow, Chaim Potok's curly-sided chasidim, and their collective archaic movement of striving-to-all-odds soaks the humid pages of a discovery of Judaism in America. At the intersection of Macdougal and West Third Streest, a Taiwanese man an a Bostonian take cold water and iced cofee at an Italian cafe. A fat man with oily brown skin croons to a hummingbird. The studded ukele throws up dust, bicyclists, hot oil, women in colorful summer sheers, roast shawarma. Fine-fingered Ash tosses white light in various forms of smirk across stuccoed residence-shops. Without purpose. A man walks by. Shouts to a couple across the street, sidwalk. The burnished orange taxis and chain-slung bicyclists green him tangentially. A carful dance ensues.

A puzzle, a spot of sushi. Sometimes the body needs to take its time. She falls alsoeep in a couch facing Heldstrom street, watches people kiss, a woman wating for the bus in front of a five storey green facade, a rush of burnished orange cabs forming beads of orange juice from under a blinking light. Neitzche does not live here. Where exhaustion is now just a state of mind of chronic becoming, she wanders through the MIT museum and midnight cross-word puzzles at Toscas. The girl on the couch does not notice her chest, which has for many hours now presented a pool of water. Her thoughts are focused on the continuity of events. Nothing tastes like orange juice here.