Manhattan Melody
Page 2
which, coming from the boy, startles and delights.
A nanny’s life … from Haiti, devoted and maternal, now
upon an hourly wage for an urbanite working couple.
But what premium has the child’s language skill,
and to what adult adventures may Creole lead him?
Even this moment, the head of tight black curls
bends to the child’s flaxen, their obvious bond.
As they speak privately in lilted island French patois,
the big sculptural boar seems to take it all in.
Many small hands have burnished the bronze,
happy to share this plein air scene with the tête-à-tête.
Wild boar sculpture by Pietro Tacca, 1970.
Vignettes
Luminescent-green leer
of blinking
ordinals,
the casket of a table clock
spews
its hornet drone.
Dream fragment
a vivid instant before
quicksilvering,
fluttery eyed
in the warm Abraham’s bosom
of down pillow.
With a flick,
phosphor of the kitchen fixture
filaments.
Pad barefoot, quick
across the slick
faux marble linoleum.
Pumper thump
as the faucet streams
a tepid flow.
Aromatic hubble-bubble
of the Braun
elixiring
morning’s coffee.
Kinographic monochrome,
the slab high-risers,
unshuttering stores,
acrid twitch
of fresh newsprint
in twine-bundled stacks.
Young Yemini
adroitly penknifes
and proffers a Times,
one-handed
for the money transaction,
a felicitation
at daybreak,
Shukran.**
Allies Day: Childe Hassam
All a poet can do today is warn.
—Wilfred Owen
Painter of flags, intoxicated by them.
Impressionist master of the martial display,
outstanding among the Flag Series, this exultation.
After America’s entry into the Great War on April 6,
the stars and stripes displayed in New York
alongside the French tricolor
and the Union Jack,
Hassam adding the Canadian Red Ensign
to the sun-struck brilliance
at the northeast corner of Fifty-Second Street,
looking north along Fifth Avenue,
there by Saint Thomas Church, the University Club,
the Gotham Hotel, and the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.
Quintessential cityscape, New York City of the noblesse oblige.
Expanse of aqua sky, pedestrian parade below.
Focal point: American flag against the shimmering blue sky
and the gleam upon the ecclesiastical buildings—
divine approval for the United States having entered
the Alliance.
Dazzled, giddy, passionate upon banners,
variations on red, white, and blue, and this symbolizing
the unity of the Allies.
The closely applied brushstrokes and Hassam’s white impasto
adding to the work’s luminosity.
New York City bedecked, ornamented, and flag-bespangled—
to imagine the sounds …
their own ferocious accompaniment to the sight:
the wind flap of Union Jack, the slap of tricolor,
stars-and-stripes wind crackle, a snap of the Canadian Red Ensign.
This patriotic panoply of a gorgeous, golden city day.
Does a bugle call to men hardly more than boys?
Wars’ harsh realities are not here.
Here, the glory and the grandeur are on Hassam’s
flag-flown Fifth Avenue.
Heavy Metal
The metallic whine, that’s the 4 train,
tasting the track grit as the subway comes.
In the accelerating tin can, I glance around at
the starers—a short, older man, combing a lush beard,
looking as if he’s plotting revolution, muttering,
“Ryby, ryby.** We’re all little fishes.”
The crackle of newspapers being thumbed open,
the narcotic of tabloids’ sex and gore.
Then amid the Times’ update of wars and economic noir,
news of extrasolar planets orbiting stars in remote constellations,
unimaginable distances far, these exoplanets and their stars;
how tidy the one progression from “Twinkle, Twinkle”
to school’s Calder mobile of our revolving eight
with the then-planet Pluto’s handball-sized orb.
The widening parameters of a “comfort zone” for life in outer space,
going by the evocative name “Goldilocks zone.”
Feeling a Morse code of the subway’s dash and stop,
clattering in a subterranean tunnel,
Squashed into by a beefy platinum-blond,
candidate for a heavy-metal band with her face piercings.
Go back to muse on scientists’ prodigal advancements;
hare and hounds to find extraterrestrial intelligence.
Next, climb from the subway into November’s gusty overcast;
326 exoplanets discovered as of this month.
Extrasolar Gliese 581d they claim as a candidate for having life,
although nothing seems alien upon exiting the 4.
The Boulevardier’s Dawn / Cocktail Hour
Pilasters held up the roof of night,
an unusual clement evening shortly past
the equinox;
about were yet sprinkled holiday
lights.
Otherwise, Manhattan, awash
in twilight.
Twilight, a fulsome and savvy blue
as pumped by an accordionist,
sky the shade of a philosophe—
subtle, contradictory.
When pilasters held up the roof of night,
an aperitif of blue, twilight that piques
the senses,
seemed to dissolve the divide to Paris.
From Lexington Avenue to the Left Bank,
le Deuxieme et Duane Street,
Champs-Élysées and Chelsea.
Booksellers along the Seine,
fringing Central Park, browsing the volumes.
Alors, in twilight, Paris a mere moment away—
a dip in le pond Atlantique.
The pilasters held up the roof of night
beyond the slow-divulging skein of infinity;
the eve moonrise (with its quadrant of frost)
was marked by propinquity.
Twilight: blue amor, as day seduced starlight.
Pictures at an Exhibition: New York City
Echoey Eleventh Avenue,
freight lift to the labyrinth of plaster wall,
Chelsea’s vogues to monitor.
Pipes of paintings, diamond-like, mine the gallery.
Gouached, encausticed, tempera-ed,
facets of stretched canvas
to browse: color as element and hue and tint
spectrums of the monochrome,
brushwork, nuanced impasto, drip, and spat
ter.
To engage with one’s eyes, dispel the strabismus of the
work-a-day
compositions, kaleidoscopic—line, form, mutable perspective
in toto the show, not of representation or abstraction but
tonalities.
An artist’s glissando,
the Chelsea warehouse as tempietto …
and the works leaving imprint
and tempi.
Some Irreparable Loss
Shattered cobalt blue upon the kitchen tiles
like gathering shards of a September sky
slivers, chips, the cedilla that was the handle,
having known an expert art historian,
a connoisseur of museum shelves of ancient Greece
gymkhana of black and red figure pottery.
The season when the mechanics of living
seemed all slipped cogs and gears,
a rutted escarpment, the slope of the day
a small storefront window with shapely bowls, vases
that advertised lessons given in the craft,
a whim—or was it an urgency?—for the savor of newness.
The sensation, the language, the techniques
reaching in to slip, elation it was to wedge,
exhilaration in feeling pliant clay upon the wheel,
a new bond to humankind’s mastering civilization,
the genius of achievement in the kiln to bake,
the divine in the impulse to glaze, to decorate.
Revisiting the museum’s galleries with another aesthetic,
each krater, each kylix a triumph of mastery,
themes and variations upon paradise’s dictum: “to name.”
Never beyond an introductory few lessons
but an inordinate pride with my cup’s final firing,
an oblation to some power with each morning’s coffee.
The Gothamburg Bible
Where the Plesiosaurus in the Natural History is a little tonier,
the Gainsboroughs at the Frick a tad blasé,
a modicum more recondite than the Continental, the cubist at MoMA,
the Metropolitan Museum’s Modigliani nude that much more exposé.
Oysters Rockefeller swim in their own element,
the Waldorf Astoria is egged on to poach a Benedict,
and the ta-mah-toe and clam marry in Manhattan chowder,
thence the potable and the maraschino bathe in rye and sweet vermouth
in the town’s signature cocktail.
The rain in Spain, foggy London Town, but nowhere else the repute
to better sell ice to Eskimos
while not the altitudenist, what other skyscraper than
the Empire State Building legends a lovesick ape?
Then, for the river’s span, that swindler’s suspension, the veriest
Brooklyn Bridge.
When the Talk of the Town gets clamorous in a polyglot of tongues—
the UN—and saris and obis give guide,
the town’s only lion’s share of Patience and Fortitude at the Public
Library at Forty-Second and Fifth, and a leonine invite to meet over “CATNIP.”
Shakespeare stagings to Strawberry Fields / the Boathouse to Bethesda
Fountain: Olmsted’s Central Park for pursuits of man
and doggy delectation.
Sidewalk’s center stage: steel drums, break dancing, rappers, a soulful
saxophone, a Latin dance band, Peruvian pipes, and a panhandling
Statue of Liberty mime.
In the Times, archaeologists debate which is the most ancient—
Cleopatra’s Needle, the Temple of Dendur, or the joke about the way
to Carnegie Hall … practice, practice.
To mourn: when sunk to a New Jersey landfill, the Baths of Caracalla,
the former Penn Station.
Also for the native pedigreed, acoustic and awestruck flatter since
the old Metropolitan Opera’s depart.
The Memorial yet lingers the reflection of the sun upon the silver skin
of the twin colossi.
That great enlarged Kodachrome that galleried Grand Central Terminal
before everything became enhanced … i.e., hyped.
Now, magnet to towns, cities, crossroads, villages—domestic
and across the globe—the glitterway of Broadway
once a Renaissance, to a gilded urban gentrification: the Apollo’s talent-
night contests and Harlem’s famed Southern cooking, going to the grits,
parade-swept Fifth Avenue and marchers who celebrate rich ethnic
diversity as they syncopate uptown,
a touch of la vie boheme, when Greenwich Village was the haunt of poets
and artists, and that bongo beat upon the bourgeoisie, the beatnik.
The city’s vividness is growing: Oy! of the Lower East Side; saints
and scungilli of the feste of Little Italy; Chinatown’s neon jumble
of restaurants (or is that a wonton number of eateries?).
What’s not on the menu at Per Se is saleable on the vendor’s cart:
the salt pretzel, kosher frank, halal kebab.
Behind upper Madison Avenue’s sleek facades to the cached boutiques
of Soho, outfittings on the cutting edge of fashion,
there, she is getting out of a cab: the Russian supermodel of the Slavic
cheekbones, the African American cover girl with the look
of a Nubian queen, the Chinese face—all severe bangs, kohl-blackened
eyes, pouted claret lips.
What the boroughs and the tourists voyeur for: celebrities.
Even in 5 a.m.’s filtered dawn in the Wall Street canyons (where heroes are
feted and those damn Yankees often ride), as a tabloid wind tumbles, its
day-old headlines yet quip to the bone
in the savvy city, classy habitation: Gothamburg.
Can You Hear Me, Watson?
Making a call is the least done on our smartphone.
Betwixt the crank-operated machine and our apps,
there was an interim when, for a time, a slim,
streamlined, push-button device was debuted with
the promotional advert “It’s little, it’s lovely, it lights.”
And, in truth, mirabile dictu, a soft glow was emitted.
This was the Princess phone and, as further inducement,
came in colors to seduce the femme teenager—
a ’50s powder-pink, turquoise, or classic virginal-white
New York City’s Ma Bell.
Surely, I’m not the only dowager who found for the Princess
another use that, in its way, twins the smartphone of today
and the Kindle or electronic book reader.
At thirteen, I had a lights-out curfew, but books were often
too delicious to put down, and so any number were read by
the glow of the ingenious light in my turquoise little phone.
Possibly, we are in the electronic age—an advanced civilization.
Possibly, too, we didn’t know when we had gone just far enough.
The Gypsy Teakettle
Going-to-seed late-’50s Rialtos, marquees
spangle Forty-Second Street.
Shorting neon fizzles double features—
oaters and biblicals.
Already the intermingled rot, theaters
billboarding triple-X flicks,
schoolgirls in penny loafers dodgy of
placards with cleavage.
Money clutched for a second-run showing
of Battle Cry,
imaginably to swoon over Tab Hunter
in marine fatigues.
Stereophonic blood and guts, Technicolor
(albeit chaste) wartime ardor
only for the virginal, the cinema vérité
of flickery Hollywood romance.
Movie sated, we exit into the city
afternoon’s warm funkiness,
funds for Schrafft’s sandwiches, but
lured up a second story
to where frowzes of Tintex blonde,
shellac black, or
a violent henna red will soothsay
our futures in
the dregs of a gimcrackery china cup of
tepid tea,
the room’s déclassé machine lace and
leatherette neither Romany nor Delphic.
Still, we’re quivery kneed to know the
auguries of
the sweat-gamy, withered leaf reader
swirling the lees.
We’re in clover—love, money, but for neither
a future with Tab Hunter.
Urban Landscape: The Metropolitan Museum
May Day, when the sun glows energetic upon the tree-shaded paving cobbles,
vendors with an array of prints, artsy postcards, iconic photo reproductions,
a grand uncle from Shaker Heights buys a souvenir watercolor
while on the sidewalk, carts boasting salt pretzels and the Sabrett frank.
About a museum fountain, a nonchalance of private schoolers
are tier-ing up the long flight of shallow marble steps, mesdames, art-goers.
She’s a West Sider, tousled brunette with sketch pad, and Lehman Wing bound