From the Winter 2001 issue of Barrow Street: Balance by Jane Hirshfield Balance is noticed most when almost failed of- in an elephant’s delicate wavering on her circus stool, for instance, or that moment when a ladder starts to tip but steadies back. There are, too, its mysterious departures. Hours after the dishes are washed and stacked, a metal bowl clangs to the floor, the weight of drying water all that altered; a painting vertical for years one morning-why?- requires a restoring tap. You have felt it disappearing from your own capricious heart- a restlessness enters, the smallest leaning begins. …
In memoriam: Genevieve Bergeron Nathalie Croteau Anne-Marie Edward Maryse Laganiere Anne-Marie Lemay Michele Richard Annie Turcotte Helene Colgan Barbara Daigneault Maud Haviernick Maryse LeClair Sonia Pelletier Annie St-Arneault Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
The New York Morning News correspondant Rosecrans Baldwin chooses his own assignment: walk the length of Manhattan. He starts out at 5am and in the course of walking the 13.5 miles of the island’s length he seizes upon a moment where even in a huge metropolis, the city can belong to the citizen: Sometime in the early morning, just before Central Park, I called my wife because I was simply too happy to contain myself. I had to tell her something, but I couldn�t put it into words. Perhaps I had never been so alive. New York can be like …
“Years ago in Vietnam, people used to take a small boat out into a lotus pond and put some tea leaves into an open lotus flower. The flower would close in the evening and perfume the tea during the night. In the early morning, when the dew was still on the leaves, you would return with your friends to collect the tea. On your boat was everything you needed: fresh water, a stove to heat it, teacups and a teapot. Then, in the beautiful light of the morning, you prepared tea right there, enjoying the whole morning drinking tea on …