Ottomanelli's

The butcher on Bleecker asked the woman what she was doing for New Year's Eve.

"I'm staying home with my dog," she said.

"What kind of dog is it," he asked.

Moore

Henry Moore: Hill Arches, 1973
New York Botanical Garden

Beaked manclouds

One night in my sleep I say that squid are beaked manclouds that wander onto the land. Come morning I sit on the bathtub rim and consider the roar inside my heart. If I am still enough I might catch the gist of it, the lilt and lisp of it, but catch is not the verb I want. The verb I want has nothing to do with a fish hook. The verb I want is an enormous dreamcatcher that masquerades as a network of underground and elevated trains all running with residual delays. 

After a long holiday there is the inevitable question, Did you miss us, to which I reply that I, too, have been away, and have missed myself.

Eros Bound

Igor Mitoraj: Eros Bendato, 1999
Market Square, Kraków, Polska

"How are you," I ask him

"How are you," I ask him in the elevator. He holds up his hand and crooks a finger. "Hanging on by one finger," he says quietly but dramatically.

Later, when I pass his desk, he rolls his eyes upward, leans back a little, and mimes grasping a dagger in both hands and stabbing himself in the chest.

Hit or miss

She wanted butter and honey on her bread. He asked whether she knew the difference between bread and cake. She said, "Pour me another." He said, "Stop crying or I'll take it away."

His humour was slant and biting; he said, "Brighton, yes. I make mistake. I born." He did not like sad movies. She preferred devastating ones: Три тополя на Плющихе and Возвращение [1].

She couldn't wash the dishes to his liking. She said, "I tried." He said, "That's what the Saskwatch told the barber: I shaved but it keeps coming back. And the wolf with the yellow teeth told the dentist: I do brush, but the elk, they stain so."

She couldn't win, but she kept playing. "Listen," she said. "That's my name," he said.

They were hit or miss. They were together.

[1] Three poplars at Pliuschikha (1967) and The return (2003)

The view from my window

The view from my window in Krylatskoe in Moskva in 2006.

Man to wife:

"Do you eat honey? Are you a nut? That's what I thought. Save the Special K for me!"

Beat flown and writ

I been beat with a long stemmed rose and I have flown over the cuckoo's nest and finally I have writ amnesty for myself, on a napkin.

What is modern and not.

When, in the train from Piter to Moskva on the first of May, we sat in opposite bottom bunks and confused the Russian man upstairs by conversing in our respective native dialects - that was not modern. We did not understand what the other was saying but we kept talking.

The crackly train radio rendered "They call me a wild rose." I said it was Leonard Cohen; you said it was Nick Cave. In retrospect it's most plausible we heard the Nick Cave version of the Leonard Cohen song. So we were both wrong and we were both right and neither of us was modern.

After we saw Onegin at the Mariinsky on my nameday, I sat out the billiards game in Liverpool, a bar that exclusively played Beatles songs. You'd make a remark, and take your turn at the table, while I composed a comeback. This was decidedly not modern. If we had texted, it would have been modern. But your phone had splintered when you dropped it while running across Nevskii Prospekt.

We meant to go to Pavlovsk, but we took the wrong marshrutka and ended up in Pushkin, so we walked through the fields to Pavlovsk, where we did not tour the palace anyway. Instead we sat on the ground and ate a picnic until a babushka reprimanded us for sitting on the grass. "Это не трава, это - болото" - "This is not grass, this is - a bog," you sputtered indignantly, modernly, in our defense.

The starling that shone.

On the way to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Photo: Il'ya Nikhamin

The best thing in Cooper Union

The best thing in Cooper Union is a pair of boots. Their soles are carved like a rubber stamp. If you press them in ink, and then step on the sidewalk, this is what they say:

The right boot: "I can't go on."

The left boot: "I'll go on."

There was a wood shop

There was a wood shop teacher in high school; he used to say, to the kids sitting on the floor outside his classroom, "You are low-lifes."

There was an assistant principal who cracked down on guitars and other freedoms. We wanted to bake a ticking clock into a muffin and sell it to her at the bake sale, so that we would always hear her coming. "Like the crocodile in Peter Pan," we said hysterically.

You used to stand outside my class, an inch before the bell rang, enough to the left or right of the open door so that I couldn't see you from my seat, and bounce a foosball, once, pointedly. If the class was quiet, I heard it and knew you were there. The foosball was a dirty rose and bore my name in permanent marker.