This happens all the time.  I have an intention, a direction I'm going, and then I look and see something -- say, something the light is doing that catches me off guard, catches my eye, my breath maybe -- and in the next moment I am doing something else entirely. 

Last night I read this: 

Para mi solo recorrer los caminos que tienen corazon, cualquier camino que tenga corazon... Y por ahi yo recorro mirando, mirando, sin aliento. 

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart... And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.

- Don Juan, quoted in The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda

Which I had no intention of even mentioning. [Who reads Castaneda anymore?]  What I thought I would be writing about today was Astor Court, the pleasure pavilion designed by Stanford White and completed in 1904 for John Jacob Astor IV, recently redone and restored by new owners and described in the New York Times [Here] in the Home and Garden section, and I urge you to follow the links because the next time someone asks me, "Why 1904?" I shall instruct them to do the same:  26000 sq. feet in the Louis XIV Grand Trianon style in Rhinebeck, New York, with the first indoor swimming pool in the country and an indoor tennis court and the whole thing costing $1 million ($22 million in today's currency) built for a man who would go down on the Titanic -- ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is how they did things in 1904.  I rest my case.
 
But then the sun cuts across the table and the book of poems by Rene Ricard [b. 1946] 1979-1980, published by the Dia Art Foundation in 1979 which looks like a Tiffany catalogue and which I have had in my collection since its publication.   It was just this Friday night, after the gym and over coffee with my friend Eduardo Santiago, that the poet's name comes into the conversation when I am not expecting it.

"We were in your building," Eduardo says, explaining he'd visited the place I live now, but years ago, in the early 80s.  "Rene and I."

"Wait," I say suddenly, stopping him, sin aliento.  "Rene Ricard?  My favorite poet Rene Ricard?" I stare at him incredulously.

"I was sort of dating him," Eduardo continues.  "I think I was dating him.  No," he decides, "I was dating him.  This was a long time ago.  I was very young.  We had gone to see this Cuban-American actress, ______."

"Rene Ricard was in my building?"

"This actress lived in your building.  Which was sort of a dump back then, you know.  Not like now."

And so on.  Over coffee at the Arclight cafe, after working out at the gym that looks out over the dome of the Cinerama Dome and the Hollywood sign. This is how I find out a poet I love was visiting someone in my building, admittedly before it was renovated and restored and hardly renovated and restored in the fashion that Astor Court has recently been renovated and restored but still, I mean, come on.  Rene Ricard, who wrote poems that seemed to describe the life we were living when we were living in New York, at the time.  Which is to say the 70s and 80s.  When I too was very young.   

And so I come home and take out my copy of his poems printed to look like a Tiffany catalogue, and then this morning the light does what it does and I realize there is a picture there, the next thing I know, I am headed down another road, remembering other times and places, other times of heartbreak and happiness. 

It's hard to pick out my favorite poem.  Here's an untitled one:

I am young
And I am beautiful
And I will fuck you
Over just like everybody else

Or the opening lines of "Caravaggio and His Models:"

He was no good; he was too young; but he was mine,
Stiff as new jeans and I loved the punk.
The night is a museum of living boys
All of them surly and taciturn with pestilential looks
That beg to get slapped around, the snarl demanding
You abstract the puppy from the beast and train him
To be your pet.  Some are just mean.

Or the opening lines of "The Slaves of Michelangelo" --

We're all the slaves of Michelangelo or something
We are bound to do; the whole show, we are its quarry; captives
Struggling against this marmoreal urge to finish
With some style; slaves to this day; prisoners
To the rough block of ourselves ...

So now you see.  A poet, like a trick of light or an old Mexican shaman, can take you in another direction, when you are least expecting it.