New York Moment

For Franck Danican

The moment you step into this city

you belong to it. You transubstantiate

from body into moment.

You are a New York Moment.

Franck arrived five years ago from Paris,

though only lately saw my creatures

in the Facebook Forest

and decided he felt one with them. Franck

knows Art the way they do: they are it.

They’ve walked the plank

and fallen into it and have become it.

Franck said he’d like to be my model:

maybe hold my violin and strum it.

I said I never work from models

but okay. And so he spent a good part of the day

bestowing what he is, while wryly undergoing

being looked at by an awkward cuss.

I made such a fuss.

I forgot how pencils worked.

I forgot what drawing was.

But then I handed him my violin and watched him

win by doing what does to play his part.

He turned that into art.

And then he turned me into art as well.

For the New York Moments

we perforce will always be,

this, of course,

was swell.

.