162 City poems

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal. We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat. They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me, from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual. Below, the river and the high rock where boys each year jump from bravado or desperation. The day flares, turns into itself. And innocently, sideways, the way we always fall into grace or knowledge, we watched the police drag the river for a suicide, the third this year. The terrible hook, the boy’s frail whiteness. His face was blank and new as your face in the morning before the day has worked its pattern of lines and tensions. A hook like an iron question and this coming out of the waters, a flawed pearl— a memory that wasn’t ours to claim. Perhaps, in a bedroom by lamplight, a woman waits for this boy. She may riffle drawers gathering photographs, string, keys to abandoned rooms. Even now she may be leaving, closing the door for some silence. I need to move next to you. Water sluiced from the boy’s hair. I need to watch you light your cigarette, the flickering of your face in matchlight, as if underwater, drifting away. I take your cigarette and drag from it, touch your hand. Remember that winter of your long fever, the winter we understood how fragile any being together was. The wall sweated behind the headboard and you said you felt the rim where dreams crouch and every room of the past. It must begin in luxury— do you think—a break and fall into the glamour attending each kind of surrender. Water must flood the mind, as in certain diseases, the walls between the cells of memory dissolve, blur into a single stream of voices and faces. I don’t know any more about this river or if it can be cleaned of its tender and broken histories— a tide of voices. And this is how the dead rise to us, transformed: wet and singing, the tide of voices pearling in our hands.

1 Take your boulevards, your Locust Street, Your Chestnut, Pine, your Olive, Take your Forest Park and Shaw’s Garden, Your avenues that lead past street-corner violence, Past your West End, past your Limit, To shabby suburban crime, Vandalism in the parking-lot, Abductions from the shopping mall— Like making the same mistake over and over On the piano or typewriter keys, Always hitting the wrong note— How “very alive, very American” They are, how chockful of metaphysics, Hellbent to obliterate the wilderness. 2 Learn to live with sycamores, Their sad, peeling trunks, scabbed all over With shabby patches, their enormous leaves In dingy shades of ochre and dun Rattling like castanets, their roots Thick as a man’s leg, crawling Like enormous worms out of the broken pavements, Continually thrusting themselves up From pools of shade they make, Sculpturing the street With dappled dark and light As glaucoma, a disease of the eye, Makes the world more beautiful With its mysterious rainbows. 3 Already in Iowa the monarchs are emerging, Signaling with their tawny wings; In regalia of burnt orange and umber The spangled imperial procession Meanders along the democratic roadsides, Across straight state lines, Over rivers and artificial lakes And the loneliness of middle America On the way to Mexico. The tiny wind of their passing Is not even recorded As a disturbance in the atmosphere. 4 Driving back into the American past, Homesick for forests, flowers without names, vast savannahs, Lowlands or mountains teeming with game, Bluffs crowned with cottonwoods, mudbanks Where crocodiles might sun themselves; Finding instead the remains of strange picnics, Replications of old selves, a cacophony of changes Like a room crowded with chairs In which no one can sit, as if history were furniture Grown splintered and shabby; Studying a picturesque rustic architecture To master its splendid abstractions, Shady verandas and porches, Or the republican simplicity of a cow.

It was necessary to move, and at this exit the beggar, cross-legged at the fork of the tunnel, calls out Love! A welcome, of sorts. The night light fucks the suburb into nightmare familiarity — not like a shrammed nerd touting guided walks and histories that contract imagination for demolition work, levelling today's housing, restoring common greens, lingering at sites orphaned of their fever hospitals — by no means that hyperliterate, poor entrepreneur — It is the view, the barbed wire roaring into view round and round the playground walltop. It is the warehouse, warehouse windows blank of occupation. It is lives, lives supplied in great number, fulfilment of numbers. It is the sense of something shared — the tailor scissors razoring open fishmouth stitches, the sewn-up pocket of the new suit, and finding something — But it is new, all new, even the gangs who graffiti chimneys scrubbed and lovely, deleted like the railways delete repeatedly the head, the occasionally payrolled head, the feet of the quartered commuters, of the vertebral week.

You’re still there in the spectral impress, the plied afterimage grid of trucks and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers from the black newsstand. Above, the trestle’s gravel bed hums expectantly, or with relief, and the gritty pinpoints of snow, at rest on silver rails, flare into the coming dark, while everywhere your hungry light still tries to reconstruct itself, charm the space in and around the looseknit ironworks, winter’s checkered yellowings glaring past the dark. From here, two years away, I see in your middle distance a trestle stretched between two brownstones, the whole scene droning deep: the train tears through the gap, ratcheting the space with green aquatic squares that flick past like old sluggish film, each frame a piece of failing, played-back fact, and the unseen wheels click, mumble, click in flukes of young clean snow fountaining up around those strangers abiding in the glass.

(for jazz orchestra and trumpet solo) New York! At first I was bewildered by your beauty, Those huge, long-legged, golden girls. So shy, at first, before your blue metallic eyes and icy smile, So shy. And full of despair at the end of skyscraper streets Raising my owl eyes at the eclipse of the sun. Your light is sulphurous against the pale towers Whose heads strike lightning into the sky, Skyscrapers defying storms with their steel shoulders And weathered skin of stone. But two weeks on the naked sidewalks of Manhattan— At the end of the third week the fever Overtakes you with a jaguar’s leap Two weeks without well water or pasture all birds of the air Fall suddenly dead under the high, sooty terraces. No laugh from a growing child, his hand in my cool hand. No mother’s breast, but nylon legs. Legs and breasts Without smell or sweat. No tender word, and no lips, Only artificial hearts paid for in cold cash And not one book offering wisdom. The painter’s palette yields only coral crystals. Sleepless nights, O nights of Manhattan! Stirring with delusions while car horns blare the empty hours And murky streams carry away hygenic loving Like rivers overflowing with the corpses of babies. II Now is the time of signs and reckoning, New York! Now is the time of manna and hyssop. You have only to listen to God’s trombones, to your heart Beating to the rhythm of blood, your blood. I saw Harlem teeming with sounds and ritual colors And outrageous smells— At teatime in the home of the drugstore-deliveryman I saw the festival of Night begin at the retreat of day. And I proclaim Night more truthful than the day. It is the pure hour when God brings forth Life immemorial in the streets, All the amphibious elements shinning like suns. Harlem, Harlem! Now I’ve seen Harlem, Harlem! A green breeze of corn rising from the pavements Plowed by the Dan dancers’ bare feet, Hips rippling like silk and spearhead breasts, Ballets of water lilies and fabulous masks And mangoes of love rolling from the low houses To the feet of police horses. And along sidewalks I saw streams of white rum And streams of black milk in the blue haze of cigars. And at night I saw cotton flowers snow down From the sky and the angels’ wings and sorcerers’ plumes. Listen, New York! O listen to your bass male voice, Your vibrant oboe voice, the muted anguish of your tears Falling in great clots of blood, Listen to the distant beating of your nocturnal heart, The tom-tom’s rhythm and blood, tom-tom blood and tom-tom. III New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood. Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The reconciliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.

The afternoon slows down, the town in steady rain. That one with the trendy chicken-plucked look— hair a tufted circle on top, the rest shaved all around— I can't really care about. Of course I hope he grows up without totalling himself and his car, but he's the clown in this act. He seems even to know his place as unworthy twerpy follower of the one no one would look away from for long, whose James Dean stance, hands deep in pockets of a rattily natty maroon corduroy blazer, shoves his shoulders nearly to his ears. Beneath the blazer, long sulked-in jeans, oversized black boots. He lifts one to kick a milkshake someone couldn't finish standing on the sidewalk, and it lands on its side, explodes and rolls a vanilla graffito, expletive unfurling. Expressionless himself. The other boy smirks before the rain douses and sweeps it stupidly into the gutter. Even if I were not invisible through this darkish window, they would know how to erase me. Well, he would. I would enjoy that, just to see how he would do it, what sort of panache he'd pack in his shrug. Raining harder, and the tuft-headed one shifts unhappily under the Revco awning, pivoting his whole body now and then to see what the one I'm half in love with's doing, fifteen, maybe sixteen: he's twitching in sublime irritation, lighting up again, hard to do with both hands in your pockets but he pretty much manages no problem, and now comes the move that gets me. He strides out from under the awning, a spotted Lucky sticking straight from his lip, walks two buildings down and turns at the corner so his back's to Main Street and me, stands, his twitch becalmed at last, stands without heeding his friend's pleading jeering calls, you idiot , you idiot , you idiot , stands hunched, not looking up or down, and I can tell this is his moment, this is where he'll break off, he's going to unload everyone, he doesn't blink as he hawks up their nothingness and spits, feeling himself filling with what's left: he takes possession of his spirited bad luck for good and mounts and rides it without moving a muscle, stands letting the rain collect behind his collar and drench his gloriously inappropriately maroon corduroy and his hair that looks not combable by anyone alive, wild and bunched even when the rain has patted keeps patting at it harder and harder like an obsolete humiliated hand that wants to feed and fend for and in general do for him, and he has turned his back at last on the clown, and on Main Street full of clowns you can both see and not see, who wouldn't dare try to keep an eye on him or try to follow him from now on.

i. the old marrieds But why the moon rose so cruelly, neither of them would say. Though a listless jazz buzzed obediently beneath their day, and he had seen the hand-in-hands dotting the dim streets. And she had heard the morning skillet scorch its Mississippi sweets, its globs of fat. Now, time to be closer — here, on the verge of May. But why the moon drooped so cruelly, neither ventured to say. ii. kitchenette building We are soft-caged behind streaked windows, our someday plans grayed and siphoned flat. “Faith” is simply a church sound, not strong like “factory,” “scrubbing the chitlins,” or “keeping that man.” But could faith be a blatant gold blasting through dinner’s fatty fumes, its perfumed lure tangling with the smell of twice-fried potatoes and twist-tied bags of reeking rubbish lining the dark hall? Fluttering beneath florescent sputter, could faith warm our rooms, even the walls scrubbed raw with Baptist chill? If we let faith in, had the mind to carve it a space, keep it Sunday clean, anticipate its slow glories, beg it to begin? We can’t spare the time faith needs. We don’t have that minute. Since silly wants like hot water require we be practical now, we wait and wait on the bathroom, hope the warm stays in it. iii. the mother Murders will not let you forget. You remember the children you had — suddenly quarry, target — the daughters with gunfire smoldering circles in their napped hair, the absent sons whose screams still ride the air. You knew the ways of bullets, prayed your child run, outrun, beat them in their race toward the heart of your baby, your sweet. You imagine another child cocking the hammer with his thumb, or blazing the blade forward, harkening the dark that will overcome you. Never again will you look at a bright, upturned face and sigh, returning again and again to drown your baby in the mama-eye. I hear on Kilbourn, on Christiana, the not-there of my children. I have pushed them flail and wriggle from my tired body, eased my babies into a world of growl and gun. The breath-suck, I wailed and prayed, my loves, as rougher mothers seized you. Now I am newly barren, drained of mother luck, and you are suddenly far beyond my futile reach. If I let these frantic streets deny the tender in your names, if I relinquished you to this city and its unrelenting games, your end is all I own. If I dared let others govern your deaths, if I wasn’t there to mourn your final blurring breaths, believe that my loss of you to this was not deliberate. Though I have no right to whine, whine that none of the blame was mine, since, in every world I’m rooted in, you are dead. Or rather, or instead, you are so much a hollow of the children I made. But now you are scar on the pavement. I am afraid — is that the you there is now, how the story of you will be said? You were born — a gunshot, a swift blade — then you died. It’s too much this way — even the child who killed you cried. Believe. I loved you all. Be. Leave me the sounds of still-thudding hearts. I grieve you All. iv. a song in the back yard I’ve wallowed in the back yard all my life. I want to slide ’round front Where it’s gold-splashed and guarded and spined fragrance grows. A girl gets a craving for rose. I want to go in the front yard now and far away from these nappy weeds — this alley too. I wanna see where the well-off children play. I want some proper fun today. They do some miracle things. They have that secret kinda fun. My daddy says They’re uppity, but I think it’s fine how they’re tucked in their beds by a quarter to nine. My mama, with her country ways, try as she may, will never turn me into a weeds and wildflowers woman, that’s a fact. I only stay up late on account of all her party folk flooding our back gate. But that’s OK. I think front yard folk are perfect. Really, I do. And I’m gonna be a righteous woman, too. And wear a soft cardigan, cashmere trimmed in lace. And stroll ’round all of Lawndale with this righteous on my face.

1 The white butterfly in the park is being read by many. I love that cabbage-moth as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself! At dawn the running crowds set our quiet planet in motion. Then the park fills with people. To each one, eight faces polished like jade, for all situations, to avoid making mistakes. To each one, there's also the invisible face reflecting "something you don't talk about." Something that appears in tired moments and is as rank as a gulp of viper schnapps                with its long scaly aftertaste. The carp in the pond move continuously, swimming while they sleep, setting an   example for the faithful: always in motion. 2 It's midday. Laundry flutters in the gray sea-wind high over the cyclists who arrive in dense schools. Notice the labrinths on each side! I'm surrounded by written characters that I can't interpret, I'm illiterate through and            through. But I've paid what I owe and have receipts for everything. I've accumulated so many illegible receipts. I'm an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can't fall to the ground. And a gust from the sea gets all these receipts rustling. 3 At dawn the trampling hordes set our quiet planet in motion. We're all aboard the street, and it's as crammed as the deck of  a ferry. Where are we headed? Are there enough teacups? We should consider ourselves lucky to have made it aboard this street! It's a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia. Hovering behind each of us who walks here is a cross that wants to catch up with us, pass us, unite with us. Something that wants to sneak up on us from behind, put its hands over our eyes and whisper "Guess who!" We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don't know about.

That city will be no more, no halos of spring mornings when green hills tremble in the midst and rise like barrage balloons— and May won’t cross its streets with shrieking birds and summer’s promises. No breathless spells, no chilly ecstasies of spring water. Church towers rest on the ocean’s floor, and flawless views of leafy avenues fix no one’s eyes. And still we live on calmly, humbly—from suitcases, in waiting rooms, on airplanes, trains, and still, stubbornly, blindly, we seek the image, the final form of things between inexplicable fits of mute despair— as if vaguely remembering something that cannot be recalled, as if that submerged city were traveling with us, always asking questions, and always unhappy with our answers— exacting, and perfect in its way.

The station platform, clean and broad, his stage for push-ups, sit-ups, hamstring stretch, as he laid aside his back pack, from which his necessaries bulged, as he bulged through jeans torn at butt, knee and thigh, in deep palaver with himself—sigh, chatter, groan.  Deranged but common. We sat at a careful distance to spy on his performance, beside a woman in her thirties, dressed as in her teens— this is L.A.—singing to herself. How composed, complete and sane she seemed.  A book by the Dalai Lama in her hands, her face where pain and wrong were etched, here becalmed, with faint chirps leaking from the headphones of her walkman. Not talking.  Singing, lost in song.