Lexington and 53rd

You've had too much wine, pretending it's Friday night even though you have work tomorrow and when you reach the subway the world is spinning. A rat lies dying on the tracks; you commiserate. There must be more to it than this. She writes from across the oceans to say she made it home alright. The pictures remind her of better times; the rat revives and runs away. The boy on the subway from work had that curly hair you can't resist: in my mind I run my fingers through it but he plays Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe with his girlfriend and you almost sleep past your stop. You pray the toothache is all in your head because you are too poor to do anything about it. Perhaps the right thing to do is cut your hair and get a job. 

He laughed so much to see me today, and all I could see in his California tan was that it is time to move on. Change is your only constant; you swim like hell to keep one step ahead. This will all end in tears. It will all end in tears. The only thing that can save your tattered soul is the art you leave in its wake. 

You must leave art in your wake. You must burn, and bleed, and put the stories  to words. Why else would life be so sad, if not for scattered remnants of magic?

Coney Island baby

The sweltering heat returns, all sunshine and humid air and the breeze like a hair dryer. Memorial Day passed quietly in the Village when all the rich folks were away in their summer houses, and we moved out onto the stoop with our cold beers and fluffy dog, it was perfect, like it always was. 

We take the train out to Coney Island, an empty air conditioned car and perhaps the kids are all still in school, and the suits are back at work, and the boardwalk feels like a whole other country. Wish you were here. We bought post cards yesterday. I've been meaning to send them one for months. The air smells like sun screen. All I want is to live like this forever with endless ocean horizon and freedom, but I don't know how I'll ever let go of Manhattan to do it. 

Showing her New York for the first time revives my love for it, makes it sparkle again like it always did. Stories resurface, begin to write themselves in the back of my spine and I don't know how I could have doubted them, as I did. 

It occurs to me that love runs two ways. So that when I doubted, all was not lost. 

Ellis Island Ferry

Hello, she said, What's your name? My name is Jasmine. Do you live in New York? She nestles in next to me at the railing. Next stop Battery Park. The breeze is cool, and welcome. That's the Freedom Tower. She points to the spire that makes all the others seem like walkups. My grandpa was here on 9/11. He went to buy some bread, and when he came out, he saw the airplane hit the building, and he ran as fast as he could and hid behind a bush. What's New York like? 

I tell her it's busy, and full of people. I ask her where she's from and try to imagine what she could hear that might stick. I ask her age; she was not born when 9/11 happened. Remember myself, in the shower, my college roommate coming in to tell me, how everything changed after that. How I thought This is no longer a country where my children should grow up.  Her hair is long, and dark, her skin tone not mine. How many stores, and restaurants, and neighborhoods were attacked because of the sound of the name of the owner.

I want to tell her it is the most awe-inspiring place in the world. That the streets are paved with magic and there is space enough in these buildings for everyone to fit their dreams. I want to tell her that the void of those skyscrapers are only one piece in the giant puzzle of stories from the people who make this their home. I want to tell her that this city is the place that makes me feel like myself, when no other place ever could, and that I still get tears in my eyes when I remember it.

It is too late, of course, she has run off to her friends to giggle and share Jujubes and get in trouble with their teachers. The south tip of Manhattan arrives quickly, its glass buildings towering over the little boat. I think of those poor immigrants, what they felt.

Realize in a hundred years, the stories haven't changed at all.

Choice

(All this thinking,
must be good for something;
all these floods of emotion
and whirls of literary construction,
must serve a purpose larger
than my own self-mutilation.

If they do not,
would I not simply
leave them behind
and
move
on
?)

Suspension

I dreamed of you last night.

And not of the way things were before the fall, but like perhaps the gash in my chest had healed. The scar may have been thick, but I wasn't bleeding. You looked at me with those sad eyes and I wanted to protect you from anything that would haunt you. Feelings do not disappear just because it would be easier if they did. The cable car moved on in silence. 

By morning, I'd forgotten most of what was said. 

But there's a dull ache, where that scar might be. 

Brand New

I have dreamed about this city so long. I didn't even think it was real, somehow. And now, here I am; I don't know what to feel at all. 

We spend our days slowly meandering through the magical city, weaving through tourist attractions and secret back streets alike. I spout out historical tidbits at every turn, but I'm not sure they're why she came. Lower Manhattan spans majestically at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge; Central Park is lush, and warm, and winding, Greenwich Village is as ever titillating with its stories of poets past. No sugar-coating necessary, no grand elaborate setups. Whatever the lumbering masses demand, it provides. Whatever the shivering refugees need, will be there before they know to ask for it. We look up our forefathers in the Ellis Island registry, see their names handwritten into the old pages. Blue, Blond, speaks English, declared healthy of body and mind. Forty-eight dollars to their name. They came here hoping for a better life.

Did not we, too?

Presenting this city to one who has never seen it proves to be a treat. I rediscover the nooks and crannies I no longer see in the mad dash to get to work, get to life. Remember that I once wanted to run my fingers over every brick and every flaw in this entire city. Realize that I still do. Oh, New York, how you are the only thing in this heartbreaking world that ever made sense.

When I have trouble sleeping--and I do every night you know, she says as we lie in the dark in the cramped bedroom on Morton Street and let the day sink in, I imagine myself going to sleep in New York. 

Now that I am here, 
now that I am here,
I don't know what to dream
anymore. 

From Adam

Marcy avenue BQE music and there's a soft breeze across your sunburned shoulders. The roof was beautiful, all mid-summer scorch and still dry enough to breathe--didn't you try to cut the humidity with a knife yesterday? We had a picnic in Harlem today, the Mexican parade making it hard to cross Central Park West, but the grass was newborn lush under your bare feet. It's Sunday, so the M doesn't, run, but you are in no hurry. 

If you think it will be great, you should go, he says, and wasn't that exactly what you were thinking? Your arguments of sanity don't make much of a dent in your sense of adventure. You promise yourself to consider it, despite the tickle in your veins. Summer in New York is just beginning, you sing louder now even when people can hear you. 

And I'm free. 

(Free falling.)

First Position

You don't feel you could love me

But I feel you could. 

Lincoln Center five minutes after curtain and the plaza clears quickly, the fountain left to its own steep rhythm. The security guard tries to woo me with talk of his businesses, and I have nowhere to go but encouragement. Bygones. When we finally stand there on the second ring, hearing the soft tap tap of pointe shoes patting across the stage floor, aren't you immediately removed from any ennui? Taut bodies worn into the tools of their trade, the tulles of their trade, they leap and bend and you don't realize until the final beat that you were holding your breath this entire time, gasping into your applause and smiling in the dark. You immerse yourself into art lately, you cannot get enough, like a newborn in appreciation, like you didn't grow up at the stage, it means something different now because you try to see their dedication with other glasses than the ones you've been told to wear for so long. 

I look forward to trying things and failing, you hear yourself say and know it's true mostly as a hypothetical, but it seems a promising start. We order another pitcher of sangria and laugh into the Queens Friday night, but the silent spaces between are deadly serious, and we let them. The city has been covered in a thick mist all day, you can still cut the humidity with a knife. 

On the subway home, I know it again. I love this city more than I knew I could love anything. It knows me, it knows me, and still it lets me move through its innards perpetually. 

If you needed saving, what other place could do it but this?

Pale Moon

The music wasn't necessarily the kind I'd listen to at home, a little too much Memphis twang and too much of the old man in his lyrics, but when that band got playing it seemed they all forgot there was a few hundred people outside the stage lights watching them. We forgot, as well, I think, whisked away into endless loops and solos, suddenly finding ourselves keeping a soft beat but otherwise frozen. I said I was mesmerized but it sounds so trite, now. One of the backup singers sat near the door, after, selling the merchandise.  

But I saw them with different eyes this time, traveling around the country on some carefully negotiated bus and collecting their own chords (also) off the stage as the crowds were going home. I saw in them not the usual assumed attempts at stardom, not the bitter failings of is that all there is. I saw instead the immense freedom of doing what one loves to do, no matter the size of the venue, no matter the fill in the bank. Such liberation has never reached me before; in that dark wooden barrel of a venue, I breathed lighter than I have in years. The art is the journey, is the goal. If you let it breathe through you, then the circumstances around it do not matter. 

We went to the Brooklyn piers today, his little toddler legs running wild in the soft grass as we picked dandelions and looked for fish in the docks. The summer sun is finally here, good proper sunlight that'll restore a pulse to your veins, and I stood there looking at the south tip of manhattan, painting itself in that incandescent glow, crooked buildings piling themselves into a corner like so many LEGO blocks, and I thought this city makes me happy every time. And I knew it was true. 

If I am to fall apart, 

And start again,

Build myself into a human being 

(A real one this time)

Then there is nowhere else I would rather do it

There is no one else I would trust 

To hold my pieces

In the fall.  

Pier 45

The day is perfect, after all, the temperatures not too hot and a soft warm breeze in the air. In Swedish we call it pre-summer; we have more seasons than you lot and such an obsession with the weather, but can you blame us? Monday afternoons bring just the right amount of people and no one demands you share their leisure with them. The trees along the river are slowly turning green and though the forecast called for clouds they are pleasantly absent. 

My hollow shell of a person sits parked on one of the wooden benches, trying desperately not to crumble into the brown swells, despite lack of a backbone. I read short stories, riveting but humanly flawed, and I try to guess whether I could do it better. The problem seems not to be perfection but humanity. People cannot reach you if you are not real. But you won't reach them, either. 

After a lifetime of unmovable Truths, I stand suddenly washed up on a whole new shore, not certain of anything. It is supposed to be liberating, but so far I grapple with even the simplest tasks of existing. All the things that supposedly made me a person (or made me a supposed person, really) lie shipwrecked in the sea behind me, bobbing nervously and far enough out of reach that I may just let them go. 

Perhaps I turn out to be not who you wanted. Perhaps I am not what I expected. It seems late to start over. 

But what choice do I have?

Revelations

I make so many mistakes, you know.
I never told you how much I appreciated your kindness,
because such admission would also reveal weakness,
and I am afraid of sharp teeth.

I opened my bedroom window yesterday
and let my bare legs swing
over the lush, green backyards
of richer people next door
and yes, I was crying,
but there was a great lightness
in my heart,
too,
so the wet cheeks
didn't seem so bad.

This free fall
is less a jump from a bridge
and more Alice
tumbling down the rabbit hole.

It'll lead to a new Adventure
Eventually.

Mirrors

(There is much going on,
in the space between,
of course.
There are open roads
and western sun,
desert stars
and snow.
There are revelations
my heart is still too green
to comprehend,
and trembling fear
in anticipation.
I wanted to tell you all that,
too,
of course,
but I'm trying to know better,
to learn from my
naive ignorance
my ignorant innocence.
Perhaps this all starts
over
now,
and the slate is clean
and the world lies at my feet;
perhaps
now
I
live.)