Where a slow line of cars follows a hearse through the perfect afternoon.

Where after a two day hayday the tulips are beginning to tatter.

Where the sun comes out and stays for hours so that the tulips open wide enough and long enough to catch and hold the fluttering white blossoms from the trees above.

Where a pit bull crosses 97th Street with a three foot branch in his mouth.

Where on the corner of Amsterdam and 94th Street two men without any official clothing or identification tie police tape around a sign post and take turns slamming a sledgehammer into the curb.

Where the little boy shouts at the newly planted tree on 97th Street, "Willow Oak, why are you so small and helpless? Get old RIGHT NOW little Willow Oak!" but the Willow Oak doesn't appear willing or able to change.

Where the passenger in the back row of the M5 uptown limited politely raises his left hand as a shield as he uses his right hand to clip his nose hairs with a toenail clipper.

Where workmen are disassembling the scaffolding in front of Holy Name Church and just around the corner a different group of workmen are planting trees on 98th Street.

Where the night doorman's copy of Getting the Love You Want is interposed with hundreds of yellow and pink post-it notes.

Where at the Kosher Bagel Basket, "home of the rainbow bagel," on 90th Street and Amsterdam, a woman sitting with her three kids in one of the three tables at the front front of the store yells into her cell phone, "Avital wants a challah TWIST a TWIST not a ROLL!" while her husband, a few feet away in a crowd of people holding palms, orders two challah TWISTS with ketchup ON THE SIDE and a whole wheat everything flagel with low fat spinach egg white spread ON THE SIDE and a toasted garlic bagel with butter and scrambled eggs.

Where at the highly appetizing restaurant, Barney Greengrass, the poet from New York says to the poet from San Francisco, "That's Philip Roth!" and the poet from San Francisco says, "I thought he was dead!" to which the poet from New York says, "certainly NOT! no, no, not yet!"

Where at the Southeast edge of Central Park's bridal path, the air has a chalky mouthfeel and smells like burnt sugar and cinnamon.

Where the day after the first summery day half the trees suddenly spring into blossom, a gesture they can't take back despite the current cold, wet conditions.

Where all the New Yorkers look like bemused tourists when the temperature hits 70 after months of chill.

Where at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the novice nuns and the very small mother gather around "The Denial of St. Peter" and then around "The Annunciation" and one novice nun says to another, "That's a very good painting."

Where, upon entering the lobby, the little boy looks concerned and says, "Is everything just going into the past?" and when his mother asks him what he means, he says, "Everything looks familiar to me so that means it already happened so it's all just going into and into and into the past," and the mother has no answer, no comfort to offer her littlest boy.

Where the monitors and machines of the Acute Elderly Care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital sound a like an experimental percussion and piano concert played in a hydraulics laboratory: twang, bleep, bleep, hissssss....wahng, wahng, hisss, shooop....

Where the poet Rob Padgett, introducing poet Alice Notley at the 92nd Street Y, looks uncannily like Lex Luthor and Alice Notley looks uncannily like Ina May Gaskin with her brains let down and loosened.

Where at 8:26 AM on Amsterdam avenue between 94th and 95th streets a white man in a bright turquoise jacket lies on his right side on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette, a gyre of smoke obscuring his face.

Where the overhead fan swirls the stale air around, around, and the white noise machine makes a sterile vortex of sound in the tiny, windowless waiting room.

Where the Columbus Avenue Park Finance branch post office smells like a buttered egg bagel with slightly burned edges.

Where even after repeated wiping, the red and blue stains from the frozen Spider-Man Bar® with gum ball eyes made from "ICE: WATER, SUGAR, MALTODEXTRIN, CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, GUAR GUM, CARBOHYDRATE GUM, LOCUST BEAN GUM, MONO & DIGLYCERIDES, CELLULOSE GUM, POLYSORBATE 65 & 80, CARRAGEENAN, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, CITRIC ACID, MALIC ACID, PECTIN, RED 40, BLUE 1. GUMBALL: SUGAR, DEXTROSE, CORN SYRUP, GUM BASE, ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, CARNAUBA WAX, RESINOUS GLAZE, TAPIOCA DEXTRIN, TITANIUM DIOXIDE, BHT (TO MAINTAIN FRESHNESS)," fade but do not disappear from the boy's pale face.

Where the butcher says, loudly, "You got to understand, I don't have no kosher knives and I ain't kosher... I ain't no kosher!" to the woman who is asking to have the kosher chicken she is buying for the family she works for cut up.

Where in front of the Associated Supermarket on Amsterdam Avenue the passersby look thoroughly aggravated by the wet April snow that turns to rain before hitting the ground except for one Mexican man who smiles broadly as he videotapes the falling snowflakes with his cell phone.