Started yesterday with a walk thru Millenium Park on Michigan Avenue adjoining the museum. This is an incredible space that was completed in July which includes a Frank Gehry designed pavilion for performance and a fantastic and monumental kidney bean sculpture by the artist Anish Kapoor which has a mirrored surface and reflects the skyline of Chicago. Tourists were gathered around the bean taking snapshots of themselves and the city.

Then on to the Art Institute's collections when the building opened at 10:30 - first stop - Gallery 109 - Tadao Ando's special room. I beat the school crowds and docent tours and had a solid five minutes or so alone in this room and than a crowd of kids came in with a tour guide. It gave me an idea to write "The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion" part II, 6 years after my first poem - this experience was very different - the docent was asking questions to get the teens to think about the space and consider its qualities and the artwork in the room had been rotated, so that now, in winter, a screen with calligraphed poetry occupied the main viewing area. Maybe it would be fun to write a series of Orchid Pavilion poems, one every season, 4 every year, capturing the seasons of the artwork rotating thru and of the reactions of viewers to this sacred space. Broke the spell and went upstairs to the contemporary collections and the Cornell boxes which have not rotated or changed at all. Remembered writing my first ekphrastic poem before Orchid Pavilion which is about a Noguchi fountain on Columbus Drive at the back of the building - the poem is called "Another bird dead on the Noguchi". I will have to dig that gem out when I get home and look at it again. The Noguchi fountain is reflected in a mirrored wall of windows which claims the lives of many small birds which end up floating on the fountain or on the surface of sculpture itself. Back in grad school, there was a student who was taking these birds, taxidermying them and then photographing them for her projects. Ugh.

Met Anna Marie and Luba, 2 former classmates, down at Columbia and had lunch at Thai Spoon. Anna Marie informs me that someone I once indulged in dating for a very very brief spell (2 weeks?) before breaking it off moved back to Chicago to enroll in her PhD program. That would have been a shock if he had shown up at my reading on Monday!

Then to the dress rehearsal of WORD/DANCE. Liked very much the coming together of language and movement - but had some notes for part III which was added into the piece to create a continuity.

Kort decided to surprise me and is flying into Chicago for the weekend to be here for the performances and to hang out together in the city where we fell in love again after he went away to Japan. What could be better?