The Village: The Seasons

(To Saul Touster) I. January 22, 1932 Could a four-year-old look out of a square sedan (A Studebaker Six in currency green With wooden artillery wheels) and see a scene Of snow, light lavender, landing on deepening blue Buildings built out of red-violet bricks, and black Passersby passing by over the widening white Streets darkening blue, under a thickening white Sky suddenly undergoing sheer twilight, And the yellow but whitening streetlights coming on, And remember it now, though the likelihood is gone That it ever happened at all, and the Village is gone That it ever could happen in? Memory, guttering out, Apparently, finally flares up and banishes doubt. II. May 29, 1941 Tring. Bells On grocers’ boys’ bicycles ring, Followed, on cue, By the jaunty one-note of prayers at two Near churches; taxi horns, a-hunt, Come in for treble; next, the tickety bass Of chain-driven Diamond T’s, gone elephantine And stove-enamelled conifer green Down Greenwich Avenue. Out of the Earle I issue at half-past thirteen, Struck, like a floral clock, By seasonal Manifestations: unreasonable N.Y.U. girls out in their bobby socks And rayon blouses; meek boys with their books Who have already moulted mackinaws; Desarrolimiento of New chrome-green leaves; a rose, Got, blooming, out of bed; and Mrs. Roos- Evelt and Sarah Delano Descending the front stoop of a Jamesian House facing south against the Square, the sun— Who, curveting, his half course not yet run, Infects the earth with crescence; And the presence Of process, seen in un-top-hatted, Un-frock-coated burghers and their sons And daughters, taking over All title, right, and interest soever In this, now their Property, Washington Square. III. December 29, 1949 The Hotel Storia ascends Above me and my new wife; ends Eight stories of decline, despair, Iron beds and hand-washed underwear Above us and our leatherette Chattels, still grounded on the wet Grey tessellated lobby floor. Soon, through a dingy, numbered door, We’ll enter into our new home, Provincials in Imperial Rome To seek their fortune, or, at least, To find a job. The wedding feast, Digested and metabolized, Diminishes in idealized Group photographs, and hard today Shunts us together and at bay. Outside the soot-webbed window, sleet Scourges the vista of Eighth Street; Inside, the radiators clack And talk and tell us to go back Where we came from. A lone pecan Falls from our lunch, a sticky bun, And bounces on the trampoline Of the torn bedspread. In the mean Distance of winter, a man sighs, A bedstead creaks, a woman cries. IV. July 14, 1951 A summer lull arrives in the West Village, Transmuting houses into silent salvage Of the last century, streets into wreckage Uncalled-for by do-gooders who police The moderniqueness of our ways, patrol The sanitation of the urban soul. What I mean is, devoid of people, all Our dwellings freeze and rust in desuetude, Fur over with untenancy, glaze grey With summer’s dust and incivility, With lack of language and engagement, while Their occupants sport, mutate, and transform Themselves, play at dissembling the god Norm From forward bases at Fire Island. But— Exception proving rules, dissolving doubt— Young Gordon Walker, fledgling editor, My daylong colleague in the corridors Of Power & Leicht, the trade-book publishers, Is at home to the residue in his Acute apartment in an angle of Abingdon Square. And they’re all there, the rear- Guard of the garrison of Fort New York: The skeleton defense of skinny girls Who tap the typewriters of summertime; The pale male workers who know no time off Because too recently employed; the old Manhattan hands, in patched and gin-stained tweeds; The writers (Walker’s one), who see in their City as desert an oasis of Silence and time to execute their plots Against the state of things, but fall a prey To day succeeding day alone, and call A party to restore themselves to all The inside jokes of winter, in whose caul People click, kiss like billiard balls, and fall, Insensible, into odd pockets. Dense As gander-feather winter snow, intense As inextinguishable summer sun At five o’clock (which it now is), the noise Of Walker’s congeries of girls and boys Foregathered in their gabbling gratitude Strikes down the stairwell from the altitude Of his wide-open walk-up, beckoning Me, solo, wife gone north, to sickening Top-story heat and talk jackhammering Upon the anvils of all ears. “Christ, Lou, you’re here,” Whoops Walker, topping up a jelly jar (“Crabapple,” says the label, still stuck on) With gin and tonic, a blue liquid smoke That seeks its level in my unexplored Interior, and sends back a sonar ping To echo in my head. Two more blue gins. The sweat that mists my glasses interdicts My sizing up my interlocutor, Who is, I think, the girl who lives next door, A long-necked, fiddleheaded, celliform Girl cellist propped on an improbably Slim leg. Gin pings are now continuous. The room swings in its gimbals. In the bath Is silence, blessed, relative, untorn By the cool drizzle of the bathtub tap, A clear and present invitation. Like A climber conquering K.28, I clamber over the white porcelain Rock face, through whitish veils of rubberized Shower curtain, and at length, full-dressed, recline In the encaustic crater, where a fine Thread of cold water irrigates my feet, To sleep, perchance to dream of winter in The Village, fat with its full complement Of refugees returned to their own turf— Unspringy as it is—in a strong surf Of retrogressing lemmings, faces fixed On the unlovely birthplace of their mixed Emotions, marriages, media, and met- Aphors. Lord God of hosts, be with them yet.