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.)