Things Are Symbols Of Themselves

View out my kitchen window, August 18, 1984

Photograph by poet and artist Allen Ginsberg

"I sat for breakfast tea mornings a decade looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized as my own world the familiar backyard, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailanthus (stinkweed) "Trees of Heaven," with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartment floors two blocks distant on 14th Street. I focus'd on the raindrops along the clothesline - "Things are symbols of Themselves," said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. New York City, East Twelfth Street, August 18, 1984 A.D." - Allen Ginsberg