Stuart Dybek

The garments worn in flying dreams were fashioned there— overcoats that swooped like kites, scarves streaming like vapor trails, gowns ballooning into spinnakers. In a city like that one might sail through life led by a runaway hat. The young scattered in whatever directions their wild hair pointed, and gusting into one another, fell in love. At night, wind rippled saxophones that hung like windchimes in pawnshop windows, hooting through each horn so that the streets seemed haunted not by nighthawks, but by doves. Pinwheels whirled from steeples in place of crosses. At the pinnacles of public buildings, snagged underclothes— the only flag—flapped majestically. And when it came time to disappear one simply chose a thoroughfare devoid of memories, raised a collar, and turned his back on the wind. I closed my eyes and stepped into a swirl of scuttling leaves.

When I met Vivaldi it was dark, a ragman lashed his horse’s bells, streets tilted into slow wind tunnels, no, it was another night, in winter, snow as soft as opium, two winoes wassailed down an alley through a milk truck’s ruts, in the subways a violin was whistling down chrome tracks, past cobalt semaphores, rats and pennies underneath the 3rd rail . . . Has it never been so quiet that you’ve heard the manhole covers rumble when the El goes overhead? Icicles growing? Could you tell the difference between the sound of filaments in light bulbs burning down, and a dulcimer played in a padded cell? A meager music hovers everywhere: at mouths of drains, echoing stairwells where girls in muslin disappear whispering “allegro.” When I closed my eyes, less than a ghost, Vivaldi cupped a mouth harp like a match against the wind.

He finds himself stepping off the bus in some burg he’s already bored with. Picking his teeth for 200 miles—here’s where he spits the toothpick out. Past Holiday Inn the neighborhoods get dark. All-night laundromats where women with circles under their eyes press laundered underwear, warm as bread, against their sinuses. Finally, he’s signing the register at a funeral home where he knows no one, but is mistaken for a long-lost friend of the deceased, for someone who has dislocated his life to make the hazardous journey on a night when the dead man’s own children have avoided him. Once again instinct has taken him where he’s needed; where the unexpected transforms routine into celebration. He kneels before the corpse, striking his forehead against the casket.

They were nearing the end of their story. The fire was dying, like the fire in the story. Each page turned was torn and fed to flames, until word by word the book burned down to an unmade bed of ash. Wet kindling from an orchard of wooden spoons, snow stewing, same old wind on the Gramophone, same old wounds. Turn up the blue dial under the kettle until darkness boils with fables, and mirrors defrost to the quick before fogging with steam, and dreams rattle their armor of stovepipes and ladles. Boots in the corner kick in their sleep. A jacket hangs from a question mark.

prays for birds before an ancient icon— a stray cat. The inbred need to pray is what makes God necessary, and not, she says, the other way around; beyond that it’s all mystery, so don’t question why Man creates gods that demand sacrifice, condemning mortals to spend their lives trying to praise godhead into mercy. Better instead to ask the frog to bless the fly, and, once the cheese is in the trap, to beg forgiveness from the rat.

In the barn demoted to garage, the ax in a cherry stump can’t be budged. Daylight perforates siding despite the battered armor of license plates— corroded colors, same state: decay, their dates the only history of whoever tilled the soil and left, as a welcome, the skull of a possum nailed to the door, and the trail of lime to the torn sack in a corner where cobwebs festoon a scythe. Rusted sharp, it sings when he grips its splintery handle, swings, and crowns topple from Queen Anne’s lace.

Fire ran horrified from its ashes. In the afterglow, cinematic shadows fled from flesh and blood. Scars appeared, followed years later by their wounds. Blinks of red dinged relentlessly, but there was nowhere to stop for the train pulling its wreckage.

It’s more than silhouettes tonight, every window in the city lit, shades lifted, curtains open. As one suspected, the dark buildings full of lovers, undressing beneath light bulbs, before mirrors. Men & women, men & men, women & women, embracing. Even the loners visible, flickered by single candles, touching places they’ve usually chosen to keep secret. So much nakedness! And the streets empty except for the newsboys moving through shadows, leafless trees snatching underclothes out of wind, the El clattering above the roofs like a strip of blue movie.

A drain spout splashing rusty stains on concrete, the taste of doorknobs you kiss before squinting through the musty keyhole at the knife-sharpener’s daughter, while across the city the knife-sharpener limps his pushcart with its dinging axles, with its screeching whetstone up wet alleys crying: scissors! knives! axes!

Sometimes they are the only thing beautiful about a hotel. Like transients, come winter they have a way of disappearing, disguised as dirty light, limp beside a puttied pane. Then some April afternoon a roomer jacks a window open, a breeze intrudes, resuscitates memory, and suddenly they want to fly, while men, looking up from the street, are deceived a moment into thinking a girl in an upper story is waving.