Throbbing Gristle-Hot on the Heels of Love

Sunday evening, I took myself on a walk about the city I've haunted for close to 12 years. After stopping off for my first ice cream cone of the season (Toasted Coconut!), I traipsed past the Walker Art Center and proceeded towards downtown (via the footbridge that spans the lanes between the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Loring Park). Along the way, I rediscovered one of the treasures to which familiarity with my adopted home has blinded me- the poem that runs the length of the bridge on either side, commissioned from the great American poet John Ashbery in 1988.

And now I cannot remember how I would
have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.
The place of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new.
Driving us to say what we are thinking.

The sky was quiet and blue and I passed quite close to it as I read and walked.

It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand
and think of going no further.

Turning from myself, I was engaged this string of words.

And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up and
places you where you always wanted to be.
This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.

True. I had made it just that far, the only place I could find myself, ontologically speaking, exactly where I was meant to be... except I was riding a springtime sugar buzz and wanted to get on with it... "Geist ist Zeit," as Hegel tells us, and amor fati spurs the spirit forward infinitely along the course of it's own diaphanous hourglass journey.

Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is.

There is no other beyond this singularity, this breathing and pulsing, this crossing... this love suspended over the city, throbbing Erhebung.

Steel and air, a mottled presence,
small panacea
and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.

A smile spread across my face as the final line kept skipping in my mind.

And then it got very cool.

The love we seek is a place we always are... a place we never get to.

And then it got very cool.