Tangent to constellations
now surfacing in the dusk
there’s a square of mottled light
from a gateshack
along the Bronx River,
a candle lit by a widow,
and the runaway girl,
missing all these summers,
searching with a lighter
for an unlocked door down a road
that leads away from the city.
Offseason at Mount Brighton, smooth jazz
Stylings of the Rod Piper Quartet. Chairs stalled
cruciform along the funicular on the hill
that mulls over seasons with silence
followed by contrapuntal clangs
and roars and clamors coming to life
in the dead season of snow makers and
swift downhill plummets.
The ride cymbal plashes through the measure
with a scrutable aptitude that leaves us
sad and listless; there’s a listlessness
to skiing when one has a love for it
as there is to this jazz; listless rigor and
unfounded belief in art’s transcendence;
balance, quad strength, I can’t explain
it but I believe it when it’s enacted
on a blistering high-gradient run.
A guy in chinos, an Izod windbreaker,
and a Titleist hat is saying “Montana
is the place to live for longevity.
There’s not much traffic there.”
Sheriffs and private security patrol
the hill, place of stacked bulldozed earth,
manufactured snow, indelible fertilizer
scent, the skull. The genre gorges on vapor
cooled to white morsels, packs it down.
Little figures hew to the ridge, and I wonder
what they’re listening to up there.
Scentless lotions on cellulite thighs—
inherited habit. Customed other mothers and
learned movie motions don’t smell,
like him, becoming sterile, sweaty,
and writhing; his fume’s religious.
Formaldehyde.
Pickled mementos stored on a hinge,
clutching a fistful of her when and why. He
could not bear to keep the list.
To clean:
The old frames,
imposing oak desks,
and then, cracks, nooks, and crannies.
There’s no unwilling
the impulse to neutralize.
Somewhere, between blank taste
and sudsy fingernails, he’s
shadowed, pursuing with the last light
a circular rubbing so fervent; bleaching
On On and On
September 13, 2021, 9/11 Memorial and Oculus Transportation Hub, NY, NY
Oculus, show me what I seek.
For me it was never about the heights
Real New Yorkers(™) seldom look up
I was too young to be anything but real
not even myself, who looks up now.
But tunnels are an endless maze
in recollection, books, wasabi, vampires,
a pinky nail long enough to give the lie.
Winter and spring, it was the garden of my teenaged…
aged, if youth is a country lost
you can still visit the cavity, probe the hole and hope
you find more wisdom than stitches.
Twenty so odd stools crowd round a half-wood bar,
filled with patrons in revelry, strangers bound by nothing
more than an ache to quench their thirsts. At day’s end,
we all share some deep recurring innate dryness,
and these guests all have flocked here to take some rest
before they gradually drift away into the night after
last call.
Somewhere between the sound waves and the smoke, there’s
something in the air that smacks of the miraculous:
A pair of hands desperately attacks a tray of glasses with a linen.
The tenders weave around the bottles and the tools like sorcerers
or prelates completing sacred rites. And the servers process
around the floor at breakneck pace, brandishing elixirs and tonics,
crafted for each and every guest who sits at ease confessing
joys and fears and hardships to their neighbors.
It’s a busy night:
Julep, Hawthorne, Collins, and Martini all have aching backs
as the clock makes its eleventh round. Then suddenly
a four top starts to sing along with earth, wind, and fire,
and by the time that everyone’s joined in, two pairs of
feet have started dancing in the corner by the window.
The side mirror tells a tale of spontaneous and
unmitigated joy.
And then it ends,
The stools are pulled out, wiped down, and inverted on the bar top.
All the evening’s apparatus goes through the necessary ablutions,
is absolved of any blemish and tucked in until the morning.
The table where those singers sat is sanatized completely and
in the half light, a mop removes the final traces of a dance held by
the window.
As the last door is locked and I dump out the bucket of mop water,
I begin to wonder why
so much human happiness is always made as if it’d never been
and every night like this always ends with
dirty water flowing
down the
drain.
Summer goes abandoned.
The October-strewn ditchbank
runnels beside my path,
sparing my footfalls any echoes.
Nothing glows but late asters and goldenrods.
The only words I’d speak
would be unwise counsel to no one,
certainly not the cardinal or hawk
who refuse all autumnal vectors south.
I am borne along in a light rain
that emerges like a rumor
wrapped in a whisper.
Like the woman’s voice
I let fade this morning
asking me to leave,
the widening light
splintering her doorway.