With Central Park as Sundial….
Central Park’s Reservoir is a sundial, if ever there was one.
In what Neill DeGrasse Tyson has dubbed Manhattanhenge, on four days per year, equally straddling the Winter and Summer Solstices, the Sun’s rising and settings are on an exact east-west basis.
UnderWoman has never seen two risings and settings the same.
Each moment, each day, each subtly changing angle….
Once it had been said that no two irises were alike, either.
But Dr. Rodman claimed that Arher and Wendy Do-It shared the match-print mirror of eyes – hazel, shot through with orange and green, spiralling like sunflowers; Fibonacci in fact….
Archer and Wendy had started the Rod and Cone Club for themselves on account of this. It was an adventure through which they better understood seeing and experimented with new ways of seeing.
UnderWoman has brought Brian to the Central Park Reservoir at sunrise.
She talks to him about the Sun, the Moon, Many Moons. About Astronomical Applications. About how she has always cemented memories through her senses, through time and space, through what she believes to be cellular imprints of a lifetime’s worth of Rising and Settings, New and Full Moons.
And him?
Brian laughs that the first letters he learned, from his scientist father, were ACGT. And it was drummed into him that every combination in the universe was writ in ACGT. We were (as David Whyte had said about Wendy’s dear friend John), “love letters to humanity” written in ACGT and DNA.
BUT, Brian was clear to emphasize, his father seemed unable to use the word “love” outside his admiration and use of these four letters, whereas UnderWoman used the word “love” to cover an inscrutable range of inclinations and attractions that ranged from ceasar salads to soul mates.
Where and how did she differentiate? What did she think of….
UnderWoman, consciously or not, cuts him off at this pass.
Did he know the names of the Full Moons? Their origins — Gaelic, Native American, and in every culture. She walks him through – Full Harvest, Full Hunter’s, Full Beaver, Full Long Nights, Full Cold Nights, Full Wolf, Full Flower Moons…
But the New Moons have no names. Perhaps today, knowing what they know, learning what they will learn, feeling what they will feel, and in preparation for what might come….Perhaps they can name the New Moons?
They begin a backwards journey of where and how they met. Walk south from the Reservoir at sunrise to the Arthur Ross Pinetum.
What other pieces of poem and music had gone through his mind that night?