New York City, January 20, 2015

★★★★ The brightness of the morning overflowed the edges of the blinds. A loose sheet of high clouds came apart into individual cloudlets, and those bits of clouds went to blue. The polished metal of the pen cast triple rings on the notebook page. Everything was clean and articulated, the daylight wide-open and generous. In the slow-moving crowd up the subway stairs on Grand, there was time to take in the texture of the zigzag metalwork and the pale ashlike flecks of debris blowing by. Outside a bakery a man down on his luck was asking passersby, quite reasonably, for a cup of coffee. And a bun, or two, why not. A brassy eagle gleamed on the door of the bank. The afternoon clouded over, but even in the night the air was still clear, the stoplights receding, apartment balconies catching the light of the street on their undersides all the way up.