My Cloister Poem by gershon hepner

In a blizzard I’m transformed into
an apparition. When they sweep
the snow and ice away they clear the view
of which I dream when I’m asleep,
unsteady in the middle ages of
my life, a climax in a cloister,
where from the busy throes of life cut-off
I turn the world into my oyster.

Holland Cotter writes about The Cloister in “Epiphanies in a Medieval Courtyard, ” NYT, December 21,2007:
THE first thing I see every morning is the Cloisters tower, gray and severe, perfectly framed by the living room window of my apartment. The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval outpost, is about a quarter-mile to the south, on a hill a little higher than the one my building is on, near the stony tip of northern Manhattan. In between is a valley of rooftops, garages and streets. Above, open sky, clouds, the moon, stars. For 20 years I’ve seen the Cloisters from this vantage, in every season, all weather. The trees of Fort Tryon Park fill out around it in spring, and go gold and brown in fall. In a blizzard the tower, which looks both militant and monastic, softens to an apparition. On cold, clear nights it’s a spaceship poised for flight with a single ruby light, like a bright little planet Mars at its peak, a beacon and warning to planes. That light is on now as I write, but I won’t be seeing it for much longer. In a month I’m moving to a new apartment, for the usual New York reason: a little more space, in my case for books. I amassed most of my library over the past two decades, though a few things are older, including a sturdy little black-and-white “Guide to the Cloisters, ” which I picked on my first visit there, on a pre-Christmas trip to New York City with my family in the early 1960s… The Cloisters, while barely changing at all, has changed a lot for me over the years, becoming a more complicated and contemplative experience — about art history, American history, pseudo-history, my history — whether I’m actually there or watching from my window. I guess part of the experience is love. I’ll miss my neighbor. Where I’m moving I will have height and sky, the river and Palisades, and plenty of stars out the window, but not that one red lodestar, aggressive and guiding, that burns steadily through the night on the Cloisters’ rooftop. I’m looking at it now. Steady means something in the Middle Age of a life.


12/22/07