MINUTE OF MONTH NO. 38, APRIL 2023
Channel: Sarah Bay Gachot
Date: 2023-05-04

No. 38, April, 2023. The forsythia was out. Two visits to Webster Hall to see @sleaford_mods and @unknownmortalorchestra then I flew to Catalina Island, CA, to research photos for an exhibition. An island that rose from the ocean five million years ago. Time changes all odds," says the book "Wild Catalina." Time makes bewilderingly inexplicable things. After being in NYC for so long squinting up at the little patch of sky between buildings, Catalina had me up before 6 every morning to go look at the sunrise. So many colors. Pinks that might be blues, mauves that might be ivories. The sunlight stimulating the fat of the atmosphere, then the colors shift and align - kind of like how birds go all crazy first thing in the morning, accounting for each other, then they calm down. One morning I was taking a picture of all of this, and I said hello to a man who was also taking a picture, and he recited a 3-minute-long poem he had written 30 years ago, "The Morning Star," about the crescent moon and Venus fading into blue as the sun came up. The stillness and silence. Everything accreting in through his senses and falling out of his mind into these extremely precise words. This poem was so good it was published in the Avalon Bay News in 1993, he said. Then I ferried, Lyfted, flew, subway'd, and bussed back to the place in New York. I caught my first cold since 2019 and stayed indoors until the last day of the Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory. There was a parade of Greek organizations on 5th Avenue that day. And rain.