Scattered pairs of new blue chairs throughout a usual red-orange theme caught my eye the other day, the last of poetry month, when I boarded a Manhattan-bound 1 train at 242nd Street, Van Cortlandt Park. An MTA worker confirmed the seats were brand-new — a test-glimpse of future subway design. Bemused by their incongruity, I made notice as passengers filled them. While reading an article on the New York Botanical Garden's exhibition, "Darwin's Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure," I thought of the new seating arrangement as a cross-pollination of sorts. Like John Ashbery's poetic style, pantoum [pan-toom]: a Malay verse form consisting of an indefinite number of quatrains with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the following one: lines that are part of one sentence loop back in another context, creating a carousel of accidental seeming conjunctions. I read on, of anthers, pistils, vigorous seedlings, hollyhocks, flax and primrose.
