-never got to see the guy-

I didn’t know much about Ralph Fasanella.

I’d seen art book reproductions

of his city paintings and liked them, in part because

the romance reminded me of my smaller city, each rising

along the banks of their rivers with an expression

of the expansiveness in the life going on inside and outside

the compressed architecture of both.

a friend, who knew more about his pictures than I did
informed me a number of years after our time in Art School, 
that Fasanella was giving a lecture in Boston and he said: “Let’s go”.

so we drove the 50 miles north on 95 to Boston to hear Fasanella.

when we arrived at the site of the lecture, we found

the building locked and dark with a hand-written
notice of cancelation taped unapologetically to the door.

no lecture.

no Ralph Fasanella.

no discussion between us over a late-
night supper at a Newbury Street cafe,
a quiet curbside table is what I romanticized 
as we locked-in to what it is he sees in the structure

of his landscape and what it is I see in the structure of my own,––

long into night, looking inward at the banks of the rivers.

1973.
1974?