On Thursday as on Friday as on Sunday, good days, as on any day of the week whose sun comes down heavy and explicit or not but so it’s the kind of sun you can feel, beyond heat, feel in the things and in the people beyond yourself, those things and those people basically radiating too, the basic sense here being that I’ve been irradiated, made better, treated somehow, and so I am excited.

It’s scaffolding season. The pharmacy at the end of my block saw the first of it, and now the hair salon and the deli downstairs are nearly surrounded. I can hear the work. The aluminum goes up first, narrow poles braced in the concrete and left for later. Never happens in a day. It’s been more than a week now that the foundation’s been set out there and uncovered, just the beams along the sidewalk, reaching high, reaching twice or more my height, reaching up for nothing yet. Soon there will be cover. The guys with the damp faces in the blue jeans and the steel-toed shoes will really get up there and lay down there these great big sheets of corrugated metal and recycled wood from some other buildings finally cleared, the metal always rusted, the wood always painted the same green, and then when it’s all over they’ll post the little white sign with the name of their outfit and a phone number, like now you can know who to call when it’s your turn.

As the season’s started to turn too, there are some days inside which the weather does a real one-eighty. I leave for the day in a jacket and by noon it’s unnecessary. I’m at the market down the street looking for just a one good grapefruit and by me by the plums a woman’s in flip flops and a tank top, and another over at the apples wears a fur coat to her ankles.

All through the winter whenever I’d walk west of the park and pick up books from the boxes out on offer from the brownstones, there on the stairs and for anyone, the pages would be so cold and my hands too and I would have to wait until later to look at them. I’ve found Faulkner and Tolstoy and Wittgenstein this way. I found a Bible once. I didn’t take the Bible. This was a children’s illustrated Bible, and honestly I don’t know what its being thrown out means and I don’t know what my taking it would suggest either. But where there was less doubt or no doubt I’d just put the book in my bag and go on, for later, for whenever I got home.

This Sunday is Palm Sunday, and the little Lenten calendar I have asks that on this day you reflect on the mysteries. I think the idea’s you conclude the season not with clarity so much as hope. They call this next week Holy Week. As Easter it’s moveable. And in the law, secular law, a thing’s considered not moveable, immovable, if its presence in a place confers some irreplaceable benefit to that place only, to that land only, and maybe that’s the land itself, and but it is fixed, not to be moved. I know I for one would like to be moved. So the law here means property but here’s something not so mysterious, however unfixed: the dark tangle of two trees over the road on a side street assumes something new when I have the sun. I walk that street every day to get to the train and somehow still I never really saw the trees. Like this. A lady in a kind of shower cap I think called a bonnet, she’s there at the train station and she’s looking half-asleep but she’s walking all the platform and she’s preaching big and she’s saying, “We all know tomorrow is not promised to any of us.” Then this edentulous old man whose whole body’s a curve’s there too and he’s telling her or he’s telling us that she’s right and he knows it. I’m listening until I can’t anymore. Until the train comes and I can’t hear and I have to leave. At work when I’m the first one there I am opening the windows and I am seeing the street and I am feeling closer to something.