162 City poems

“I saw a friend from growing up who’s been living in L.A. for about twenty years, and I heard him say, ‘I’m from L.A.,’ and I said, ‘No, man, you from Philly. We don’t give nobody up.’” —Khan Jamal jazz vibraphonist Fish-man comes with trout and fresh crabs: “Live! They live crabs! They live crabs!” Bars called “Watutsi.” “Pony-Tail.” A dark green suit, a banded hat. The gentleman buys pig’s feet and papaya juice. He looks like church. Another man, down Spruce Street, says, “Yeah, California’s beautiful, but I ain’t got no people there, so I came back. I raised a racehorse. Trainer says he’s mean, but I say naw, naw. That horse just alive.” Which way to walk down these tree streets and find home cooking, boundless love? Double-dutching on front porches, men in sleeveless undershirts. I’m listening for the Philly sound— Brother            brother            brotherly love.

I The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps. II The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades That time resumes, One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms. III You tossed a blanket from the bed, You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; Sitting along the bed’s edge, where You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands. IV His soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feet At four and five and six o’clock; And short square fingers stuffing pipes, And evening newspapers, and eyes Assured of certain certainties, The conscience of a blackened street Impatient to assume the world. I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain. To paint half a man on a half a horse. To paint a dolphin in a forest. To color feathers on a beast. To grant a maid a fish's waist. To graft or to wax, whether clay, whether nether. As men graft their gods upon empires. Then we build mirrors to better understand ourselves, to better understand our souls, and we ask ourselves reflectively, Where? then Who? Woe unto us, we are building our city from our urine. Maintaining it with our fardels and with facts. The burbs we raise to the ranks of birds. Then we furnish them with words that wilt, like oak and elm and ash. Busily we build our city. Toilsomely we lay the bricks. Men of the six-clock give way to those of nine, those of the nine to the generation of twelve, and those of the twelve tend to disappear, making room for the more fashionable folks who make the two-o-clock noon in the middle of day by the greedy ill will of pills. Toilsomely we build our city. Burdensomely we tow the line. Those ministers who refuse to tow we quickly omit. Then, when the city is complete, we sit back in the stadium bleachers and wonder how the generated world can be so excellent. How the emulated world can be so grand. How the phone pole stands in for its form. How matter is glued to the elements of ideals. Then, when the city is complete, we sit at the edge of our great new void, like frogs at edge of a pond, like birds whose nests are littered with knots. Here, we live here in the syllables of our screams where vowels hang like fish hang on hooks. Out of the water. Like consonants with their scales scraped off. And because we fear our world is growing weary, we fill our homes with booty and with loot. Then our big city crawls into the country, dragging its mountains right along with it. Like death that extends itself with golden planks, we hang ourselves by silk, by twine, by telephone cords. The religious tongue becomes the last supper that we swallow greedily and without chewing. Like death. That is the supreme fortune of man. This is a studied and digested truth. A couple of hours later, we find ourselves at the junction of shanties where prairies host the sprawling city of Denver, that long lost city of long lost ghosts who haunt the long lost plains, that lifeless and wifeless city, in contrast, of course, to the Big Apple, that city of violated treaties, that wailing city set for the protection of infinity, so like the city of the seven gods, so like Rome, so with its epithets, with its alphabetical locomotives. There, only dogs can find the grisly burbs where the grisly grass slowly grows. Where savage canoes now blossom into lilies. Montgomery says it's not a place of roof and of walls, it's more like a company, it's more like a corporation. But what is the city but its steeples and domes? What is a city but its spires and its clocks? Time, the people of the city. Time, the bluntest eye, the lion's padded paws. Sea dreams and my flowering germander eyes droop at the factoried gloom. Bank rates are a codex to the cross. This is the religious box body. This is the largest corporation in the world. This, with a sprinkling of poetry and a poetic moat. Sea dreams, a new born clerk, all raised and bred. A maze of cuneiform streets spread like a spider's web. Not dapper, but cricket-like. Not coned, but molded. The lot is posted for the dock. Violets are sold at a hundred a piece and marshals ride on horseback while Homer makes his slow way home.

So sexy to slide under- neath a river, to sit inside this snakelike sub- marine-like subway car and freely imagine the world above— the Brooklyn Bridge invisibly trembling with the weight of its own beauty, the East River still guided by the grooves Walt Whitman's eyes wore in it, the bulldog tug- boats pushing the passively impressive broad-bottomed barges around, and the double- decker orange and black Staten Island ferries, with their aura of overworked pack-mule mournfulness, and beyond them the Atlantic Ocean which I lately learned was brought here by ice comets three billion years ago, which explains a few things, like why everybody feels so alienated, and of course the thoughts being thought by every person in New York City at this moment— vast schools of undulating fish curving and rising in the cloud-swirling wind-waved sky, surrounded by the vaster emptiness of non-thought which holds them and which they try not to think about and you lying in bed in your sixth-floor walk-up sublet on St. Mark's Place— such a breath- taking ascension! imagining me rising now to meet you.

I Oh chimes set high on the sunny tower Ring on, ring on unendingly, Make all the hours a single hour, For when the dusk begins to flower, The man I love will come to me! ... But no, go slowly as you will, I should not bid you hasten so, For while I wait for love to come, Some other girl is standing dumb, Fearing her love will go. II Oh white steam over the roofs, blow high! Oh chimes in the tower ring clear and free! Oh sun awake in the covered sky, For the man I love, loves me! ... Oh drifting steam disperse and die, Oh tower stand shrouded toward the south,— Fate heard afar my happy cry, And laid her finger on my mouth. III The dusk was blue with blowing mist, The lights were spangles in a veil, And from the clamor far below Floated faint music like a wail. It voiced what I shall never speak, My heart was breaking all night long, But when the dawn was hard and gray, My tears distilled into a song. IV I said, “I have shut my heart As one shuts an open door, That Love may starve therein And trouble me no more.” But over the roofs there came The wet new wind of May, And a tune blew up from the curb Where the street-pianos play. My room was white with the sun And Love cried out to me, “I am strong, I will break your heart Unless you set me free.”

sometimes ( when the night air feels ch é vere! ) when i can hear the real sound of el barrio on la conga        y timbales coke bottles & garbage can tops when i can feel & reallyreally touch la m ú sica Latina /     africana & the fingerpoppin' soul emergin from tears /     sweet tears of laughter & i can feel a conglomeration of vibrations / heat waves body waves people waves of real gente

hunched over the greasy burner on the stove was noir, as in film noir, as in cauchemar, as in le nuit not blanche but noir, the dream you can’t wake up from, meaning she was a mouse fatale, licking the old oil glued to the old cooktop, feasting in her tiny hunched-up sewer life on fats & proteins for her bébés all atremble in their rotting poubel nest, so when I screamed my piercing Anglo-Imperial scream of horror & betrayal— not my stove, not my traces of pot au feu— she leaped, balletic, over the sink, the fridge, the lave-vaiselle, & back to the cave& the trash she scuttled, grim as a witch in La Fontaine who has to learn the lesson we all must learn: Reality is always sterner than pleasures of the nighttime burner.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve found names, personalities as brittle, excuse me, as braille hints of interest, latched to the slightest meaning. Not parlance. Let me say power. The days rotate on their hinges. I can say I had friends. Sizable numbers, without delay, we were like, I don’t know, an absence. A civilization. Prompt and unlike ourselves at all times: it was as if we could stand to burst, to rapidly be our own engines, rules, buildings, steel columns, iron beams. This is when I said I had a foundry. I had a scale, a summary and reflection, not the desire, but the capacity to be greater in titles and official things. Then I gave it up. I sunk hillsides and fields and ash dumps. I ran the concrete forth and I became the swarm, the throng, corporate in absurdity. Most people in opposition would say these are the words I’ve prepared, while I am a speaker without my text, let the day surprise me. If it falls, it’s me who gathers from idiosyncrasies sentences to shape a state and city.

The great gold apples of night Hang from the street's long bough Dripping their light On the faces that drift below, On the faces that drift and blow Down the night-time, out of sight In the wind's sad sough. The ripeness of these apples of night Distilling over me Makes sickening the white Ghost-flux of faces that hie Them endlessly, endlessly by Without meaning or reason why They ever should be.

I In the cubbyhole entrance to Cornell and Son, a woman in a turquoise sweater curls up to sleep. Her right arm seeks a cold spot in the stone to release its worry and her legs stretch against the middle hinge. I want to ask her in for coffee, to tell her go sleep in the extra bed upstairs, but I’m a guest, unaccustomed to this place where homeless people drift along the square bordering Benjamin Franklin Parkway. From her portrait on the mantel, Lucretia Mott asks when will Americans see how all forms of oppression blight the possibilities of a people. The passion for preserving Independence Square should reach this nameless woman, settling in the heavy heat of August, exposed to the glare of every passerby. What makes property so private? A fence? No trespassing signs? Militia ready to die for it and taxes? Lights in the middle storeys of office buildings blaze all night above me. Newspapers don’t explain how wealth is bound to these broken people. North of here, things get really rough. Longshoremen out of work bet on eddies in the Schuylkill River. Factories collapse to weed and ruptured dream. Years ago, Longhouse sachems rode canoes to Philadelphia, entering these red brick halls. They explained how the law that kept them unified required a way to share the wealth. Inside the hearths of these same halls, such knowledge was obscured, and plans were laid to push all Indians , west. This city born of brotherly love still turns around this conflict. Deeper in the dusk, William Penn must weep from his perch on top of City Hall. Our leaders left this woman in the lurch. How can there be democracy without the means to live? II Every fifteen minutes a patrol car cruises by. I jolt awake at four a.m. to sirens screeching and choppers lugging to the hospital heliport someone who wants to breathe. The sultry heat leads me to the window. What matters? This small square of night sky and two trees bound by a wide brick wall. All around, skyscrapers are telling their stories under dwindling stars. The girders remember where Mohawk ironworkers stayed that day they sat after work on a balcony, drinking beer. Below them, a film crew caught some commercials. In another room above a mattress caught fire and someone flung it down into the frame. A woman in blue sashayed up the street while a flaming mattress, falling at the same speed as a flower, bloomed over her left shoulder. Every fifteen minutes a patrol car cruises by. The men inside mean business. They understood the scene. A mattress burning in the street and business deadlocked. Mohawks drinking beer above it all. They radioed insurrection, drew their guns, then three-stepped up the stairs. Film crews caught the scene, but it never played. The Mohawks didn’t guess a swat team had moved in. When policemen blasted off their door, the terrified men shoved a table against the splintered frame. They fought it out. One whose name meant Deer got shot again and again. They let him lie before they dragged him by his heels down four flights of stairs. At every step, he hurdled above his pain until one final leap gained him the stars. The news reported one cop broke his leg. The film’s been banished to a vault. There are no plaques. But girders whisper at night in Philadelphia. They know the boarding house, but will not say. They know as well what lasts and what falls down. III Passing Doric colonnades of banks and walls of dark glass, passing press-the-button-visitors-please Liberty Townhouses, I turned up Broad Street near the Hershey Hotel and headed toward the doorman outside the Bellevue. Palms and chandeliers inside. A woman in mauve silk and pearls stepped into the street. I was tracking my Mohawk grandmother through time. She left a trace of her belief somewhere near Locust and Thirteenth. I didn’t see you, tall, dark, intense, with three bouquets of flowers in your hand. On Walnut and Broad, between the Union League and the Indian Campsite, you stopped me, shoving flowers toward my arm. “At least, I’m not begging,” you cried. The desperation in your voice spiraled through my feet while I fumbled the few bucks you asked for. I wanted those flowers— iris, ageratum, goldenrod and lilies— because in desperation you thought of beauty. I recognized the truth and human love you acted on, your despair echoing my own. Forgive me. I should have bought more of those Philadelphia flowers, passed hand to hand so quickly, I was stunned a block away. You had to keep your pride, as I have done, selling these bouquets of poems to anyone who’ll take them. After our exchange, grandmother’s tracks grew clearer. I returned for days, but you were never there. If you see her — small, dark, intense, with a bun of black hair and the gaze of an orphan, leave a petal in my path. Then I’ll know I can go on. IV Some days you get angry enough to question. There’s a plan out east with a multitude of charts and diagrams. They planned to take the timber, the good soil. Even now, they demolish mountains. Next they’ll want the water and the air. I tell you they’re planning to leave our reservations bare of life. They plan to dump their toxic wastes on our grandchildren. No one wants to say how hard they’ve worked a hundred years. What of you, learning how this continent’s getting angry? Do you consider what’s in store for you?