Urbanal : Morningside Park, NYC

Urban parks. What are the animals in an urban park? We have the graceful pigeon: the winged vermin. We have ducks in the green water, bread-gobbling. There is the occasional smaller bird I will call the diminutive sparrow. There is the large fly, ceaseless in its plotting, rubbing hands in evil contemplation. And there are humans walking dogs, picking up poop with plastic-bagged hands.

The trees are beautiful, splotched with greens, tall, leafy, handsome. Some wisps by the water, by the water falling green-foamy from the rocks up by the caution tape. And the soothing sound of rushing water aided by the soothing sounds of groaning traffic. A dump truck, a maintenance vehicle. Their flatulent gasps and groans. And to my left, more caution tape, yellow, black bold type, circumfrencing the playground, yellow and blue with all the floor stripped. No way to walk up the ramp or across the bridge with no floors anymore.

Mmm, hear that jack hammer in the background? And the dump truck is on the move again. Car alarms and buildings rising above the oh so green trees responding to the breeze and dappling shade down to us who wish to not sit in the heat.

The diminutive sparrows rustle in the dirt. They take dirt baths and fidget amongst themselves while the greater pigeons walk bobble-headed and pecking.

NO TRESPASSING. DANGER. These are the signs on the island in the middle of the green-grown lake.

The lamp posts are on and illuminating nothing but their own bulb's shape. Sirens and dump trucks. A bus honks. The sirens come closer, rattling their repeated warnings. The caution tape rattles in the wind, whipped and fluttering rattled ribbon of plastic. A coffee cup rolls back and forth on the ground as if a skiff on the calm high seas.

A small survey of the immediate vicinity around me yields: a Heineken bottle cap, a large bolt, a few cigarette butts, a shirt tag, various coiled pieces of string, a red expanded rubber band, more bottle caps, bits of plastic bags, and an assortment of different-colored foil scraps. Ah yes, and there is dirt, some leaves un-greening, and small rocks. One must learn to not look too closely, for to do so would be to miss the beauty of an urban space of green. An urban park is meant to be an amalgamation of these things. These things which seem so out of place, yet accepted by the pigeons, the trees, the grass, and diminutive sparrows, who harbor no resentment, who preen and let fall their feathers and leaves and abide by the sun.

And there is the field being sprayed by exuberant jets, by the sprinkler spouting catharsis. The baseball backstop and all the surrounding benches around the walkway giving walkers a place to plant themselves and view what? The plants perhaps? Their own regaining breath? It all fits quite nicely with the occasional surging cicada call.

And here I sit with all of it, half-content, half-annoyed but for that epic silent greenness provided by these indifferent trees, watching people without a blink come and go, being perched on by pigeons and diminutive sparrow creatures, seeing time unwind in such a slow process that the rise and fall of a building occurs like the dawn of each morning. And truly, these Harlem building fit in well. These trees fit in well. And I find I myself can fit in well, for a time, in a state, because I am here and waiting for it all to make sense beyond mere circumstance.

And if I look with the eyeless eyes of a tree, I can see the sidewalks crumbled with overgrown roots, the lamp posts swallowed up by vines, the buildings half-crumbled in dilapidation, grass grown over the bottle caps and butts, the benches stained with rain upon rain, and all that used to walk here gains an ancient mystery more beautiful that what walks now, but as the woman walking by the road has just said: "...and that's a nasty-ass waterfall, but it's all good."