Polisphilius, listen. I am going to walk you down to Cafe Viand at 74th and Broadway. I want you to fortify yourself with an egg-salad sandwich and a Beck’s.

I have to leave town and take care of some other business.

Promise me you will take the train up to the Cloisters. Live long and prosper.

devilsickofsin asked: Weather is too damn cold.

When Theodore Roethke came to New York, he liked to stay at the Hotel New Weston. The building has since been razed, but it used to cater to fashionable people.

Here is one of Roethke’s most famous poems:

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Let’s walk up to 72nd and then down to Central Park West. We will pass the place where John Lennon was killed. The Dakota, where he lived, is the Upper-West-Side’s Plaza Hotel (designed by the same architect, built in the same decade.) We will turn north and head towards the Natural History Museum.

“We think by feeling. What is there to know?”

What is there to know? Something, I believe. Roethke is right, though: None of us can explain how Light takes the Tree.

But wait. When Roethke observes that ‘Light takes the Tree,’ can he mean the Light of the World who took the axle-tree? I can’t think the poet meant this. But the fact is: He alone—Christ—can tell us how. He tells us how to wake to waking.

Imagine…Here is a little poem for you:

Behind McAfee’s Knob

The sun sets behind McAfee’s Knob.
Orange blazes out,
below the cloudline,
more brilliant than day allows.

I believe that back there
behind the mountain
they are tanning without sunburns
and rocking out to my iPod.

Who? Cash-register workers
and people who pay:
all are locked in an embrace.
(No counters in between.)

Dogs are looping but not pooping.
It’s an InBox with no spam.

A vesper hymn sounds behind me:
Rush-hour traffic in harmony,
keeping time,
rolling west…

Christmas is here,
and it is coming.
Everyone has a tumbler of coffee,
drunk with no hangovers.

The man says, “Come here,
I have a secret to tell.”
He licks his lips.
The secret is a kiss.

“You’re sending me tulips mistaken for lilies…”

The Upper West Side is bounded by two parks. To the east, our old friend Central Park. To the west, a ribbon of green along the Hudson called Riverside Park.

The “Main Street” of the Upper West? Broadway. The most magnificent architectural façade? The Ansonia at 73rd Street. The best meal? Peking Duck at China Fun on Columbus Avenue between 71st an 72nd.

Hungry? Starting from Dante, let’s walk right on up Columbus Ave…

Lincoln Center is marvelously unattractive on our left. This is where “West Side Story” took place. The slum was torn down to build this space-station-like campus.

Regrettably, we cannot stop in to read the paper at Café Mozart on 70th Street, because the place is closed. What we can do, though, is walk and discuss.

The Broadway-Seventh Avenue Interborough Rapid Transit built the Upper West Side. The subway from City Hall to West 145th Street was the first underground train route to open, in 1904. An uptown building boom followed. Columbia University had recently moved from mid-town to Morningside Heights, fifty blocks up Broadway from where we are now.

The original history of the UWS is the life that Jewish émigrés made for themselves here in modest apartments with pianos, nourished by gefilte fish and the crispiest pickles.

Where are you going to go for the coolest concerts in town? The Beacon Theater, of course. 74th and Broadway. Someone I know saw Bob Dylan play there in 1988 and met Allen Ginsberg in the crowd. Ironically enough, Natalie Merchant (who does NOT approve of Beatnik-ism) played the same stage just two months later.

I almost forgot to tell you that we have to shoot down 63rd Street. We are going to visit the statue of Dante Alighieri, canopied by the trees across Columbus Avenue from Lincoln Center.

FYI: When Dante wrote his poems and books, everybody thought that Latin was the language for smart people, since it is such an excellent language. Dante spoke Latin as well as Julius Caesar ever did.

But the Florentine loved the language he learned at his mother’s knee more than the Latin he learned in school. He loved his mother tongue like he loved his mother land. Dante had enough reverence for his mother tongue to see that he owed his very existence to it:

This vernacular of mine was what brought my parents together, for they conversed in it, just as it is the fire that prepares the iron for the smith who makes the knife; and so it is evident that it has contributed to my generation, and so was one cause of my being.

If our parents had never spoken to each other, we never would have been born. Our parents could not have spoken to each other without our native language. Therefore we must love our native language like a mother or a father. Beautiful! We love you, o venerable English of the Queen! May we use you worthily, respecting you with the deepest humility.

Do you ever wake up with the feeling, ‘I really need to hear some bassoons rocking Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” right now?’

Let’s hop on the #1 train at the South Ferry subway station and head for Columbus Circle.

When Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, he had envisioned a grand circle at the southwest entrance. A statue of the great Genoan seafarer was erected to commemorate the fourth centenary of the discovery of our continent. After the Twin Towers downtown were destroyed, Time Warner built another set of twin towers here.

A young man I once knew admired a young woman who lived with her parents in an apartment on Central Park West. He told the dark-haired beauty that he would wait for her in Columbus Circle until she came around. He camped there for several months, and she finally came.

Columbus Circle is the gateway to a unique realm. We will step through this portal and begin our exploration of a land flowing with milk and coffee: the Upper West Side.

We are trying to get to Lincoln Center at 66th Street to see if they have Peer Gynt on this evening or not. The chances are one in a hundred, and even if they are performing “In the Hall of the Mountain King” this evening, the chances are less than one in a million that there will be tickets available which we can afford. If we find a rich benefactor in front of Trump Tower, we’ll try to get some Philharmonic tickets. Otherwise, we will just listen to Bernstein conducting on our iPods.

Let’s stroll up Central Park West. I will write you again in a week or so, dear Polisphilius.

Bassoons!

Let’s take a run down Bay Street to Von Briesen Park. We can look out over Fort Wadsworth and the Narrows. We can admire the skylines of Brooklyn and Manhattan. We can marvel at the $13-toll bridge.

After running back downtown, let’s walk up the hill to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Stuyvesant Place and drink some coffee. Then back to the ferry terminal to look at the fish in the aquarium. We will catch the next ferry.

A-Rod’s 600th homerun, on August 4. Still wears the calf socks. My man.