I did something wilder than usual last week, I took a red-eye to New York to see Christo's Gates Project. This sort of thing is not in my budget, but I had planned ahead, so I had the dough saved up. I met two friends there whom I never get to see, was completely transported by the Gates, and it taught me all over again that a poet needs to leave town and look at strangeness once in a while, in service to her art.

Christo's Gates in Central Park are not like garden gates, those waist-high interruptions in a picket fence. They're portals — enormous orange door frames for the house of a giant — and imbued with all the mythology that metaphor implies.

If you haven't seen the photos yet or watched 60 Minutes, each gate is 16 feet tall, made of three pieces of steel encased in orange plastic — two tall verticals with a cross bar at the top. From that top bar hangs a swathe of sturdy orange rip-stop nylon, pleated at first and then loose, ending 7 feet above the ground, so that everyone except basketball teams can walk underneath them. I didn't see any basketball teams, but just about everyone else showed up: walkers, bikers, skateboarders, roller skaters, little kids on their dads' shoulders reaching up to swat the fabric, old couples in wool coats and orange mufflers. Everyone seemed to wear orange if they had any.

Have I mentioned that there are 7500 of these things, arching over 23 miles of paths in Central Park? The sheer number gave the project a glorious lunacy. From any given point you could see at least three or four Gates, and most of the time you could see more like 200, angling off crazily under the trees.

I walked the length of the park with my friends, riffing on what they reminded us of — curtains in windows, laundry on the line, rows of ballet dancers, prayer flags. The wind blew some of them but not others, so it seemed as though the whole regiment was in motion — like a slow-moving Chinese New Year dragon. The volunteers tried to tell us the color was saffron, but it wasn't as yellow or as dark as that. It was a true Cal-Trans-truck orange, vivid under blue sky, luminous under gray.

We fell into conversation with lots of people — a tiny French woman, elegant in a full-length (orange) down coat told me they were a gift to the city, and a burly young man in a sweatshirt growled that they were OK. Some people were crying, as I had cried when I first saw them, although I couldn't tell you why. Maybe it's the grandness of the gesture that's so moving — like coming upon acres of poppies or a huge pod of whales.

Mostly everyone looked at the Gates in wonder — talking a mile a minute, since it was New York — and smiled at one another. As we left, a cop on the corner said to his partner: Look at all these people! The city hasn't been alive like this since the towers fell.