Invisible Strings - 9. "Heaven in Grand Central Station" by Joseph O. Legaspi

"Heaven in Grand Central Station" by Joseph O. Legaspi

We now interrupt your normal programming for a poem that I missed 😳 I went back to consult the Contents to make sure I had my numbering right, and low and behold, I missed poem number nine. So, I renumbered all the other entries and am going to put this one here since I just caught it.

I think this one has to be "invisible string." There is early placement of the word green in both the poem at the song - "Cornstalks swaying and yellow greening" in the poem, and "Green was the color of the grass" in the song. Then, we have the appearance of the word pretty in the poem - "Wasn't it pretty music?" and in the song - "Isn't it just so pretty to think / All along there was some / Invisible string / Tying you to me?"

Mid-poem and mid-song the narrator is/has been in the wrong place:

Poem: "To think years later in a big city I was at the wrong party"

Song: "A string that pulled me / Out of all the wrong ones right into that dive bar"

And I have to say that I don't recall ever seeing the use of "bold was" in songs or literature before, or if I did, it just never stuck out to me. But we have that construction in both the poem and the song:

Poem: "bold was your act of proclamation of love in Grand Central Station"

Song: "Bold was the waitress on our three year trip / Getting lunch down by the lakes / She said I looked like an American singer"

I also spotted something in the poem and song, and I'm not sure if it was intentional, but I love it all the same. In the song, she begins the chorus with a slightly different line each time - "Time, curious time," "Time, mystical time," and "Time, wonderous time." The last line of the poem seemed like a reflection of that - "starry Orion constant in the celestial, illuminated, illimitable space."