Manhattan Melody

Home > Other > Manhattan Melody > Page 4
Manhattan Melody Page 4

by Patricia Faith Polak


  For tamer types, the scratch-off card

  is a matchless experience.

  Then, the Mega lotteries, the jaw-dropping,

  googol-figured purses with only

  half back to Uncle Sam.

  ’Twas once said no man jumped off a

  bridge with a lottery ticket in his

  pocket … presumably, inflation

  buoys the survival rate.

  Dolce Far Niente

  Oprah raved, and the book is there

  in your lap

  as the 20 bus makes its vibrato

  perambulations.

  But then with climbers

  aboard,

  summer’s nonpareil novel

  is put aside.

  Ascending the steps,

  into the aisle

  a cavalcade of humanity—

  faces to watch.

  Long, sweet, dreaming

  to West Fourth Street stop

  or at renascent at Tavern on the Green’s

  outdoor tables—

  or from gallery seating at

  Grand Central’s concourse,

  a spectacle of passersby: the weaving

  parade

  not Veneto surely, or Champs-

  Elysées—not Marrakech

  of storytellers and dancing

  snakes.

  Suffice this city to hypnotize,

  to lull the axions and dendrites.

  Time melts Dali-esque in

  the pursuit of naught.

  Naught but the sensation

  of human living

  does people watching make

  us humanists.

  To Italy’s, to France’s, to Morocco’s

  spellbound—

  add that the “city that never

  sleeps” has mesmerized.

  The Saint’s Day Party

  Throughout Bay Ridge, proprietors of jewelry

  and specialty shops look expectant near

  the feast of Saint Rosalie.

  Dizzying aromatics perfume from the kitchen

  where zias Domenica, Carmela,

  and Annunciata labor.

  Pilgrims to the house to pay respects to nonna,

  Rosina Felice, on her saint’s day,

  expect to be surfeited.

  The three zias are pressing sheets of dough

  for manicotti; there will be

  whole roasted lamb and suckling pig.

  In an assembly line of Calabrese origin—eons

  older than Henry Ford’s—the sisters will fill

  cannolis and cream puffs.

  Nonna’s two eldest granddaughters, Rose Anne

  and Rose Marie, buff, wax, polish, vacuum

  rooms where a dust mite is as rare as a

  space alien.

  Then a hush falls upon preparations

  and a bedroom door cracks open—

  escaping, the sound of

  an Italian radio station.

  Nonna makes a slow inspection

  as she heads for her chair;

  and Rose Anne and Rose Marie vie

  to bring her in the living room

  the licorice cup of demitasse.

  For an Italian grandmother, nonna is tall,

  and she is heavy with many childbirths,

  for a long time sumptuous living,

  and a traitorous body.

  Rosina Felice settles into the tapestried wing chair

  and, her leg troubled by diabetes,

  goes upon a leather footstool.

  She has light olive skin, small features,

  and she is quite vain—

  including about her wedding dowry

  of a large, square aquamarine ring

  and matching earrings.

  Nonna anticipates her afternoon,

  with the footstool; to approach her

  to give the mandatory kiss upon the cheek,

  it is necessary for her visitors to kneel

  upon one leg.

  She sips her demitasse.

  Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile? Rosina Felice’s!

  E bene … the day of Santa Rosalia.

  Eight O’Clock

  Was it her Viennese? Like an oiled clockwork,

  she ran upon coffee

  mother in a floral robe measuring out

  the Eight O’Clock, the Great Atlantic and

  Pacific Tea Company’s ground bean

  in its prideful scarlet sack.

  Then I, at age three or four, was first taken—

  chick to her biddy—to those

  disappeared cathedrals of fashion

  Best and Company, Bonwit’s, Arnold Constable,

  and B. Altman.

  After a morning’s try-ons, we’d go

  to Altman’s Charleston Garden,

  and she’d order me cocoa or lemonade

  and coffee for herself

  but with the injunction to me “Now let’s

  sit down like two old ladies over a

  cup of tea.”

  Unrelenting time, my mother, long since dead,

  upon occasion, I go now with a

  lady friend for that most cosseting of

  meals, high tea,

  to speak of work and travel, theater seen

  and art galleries visited.

  The sandwich of cress or cucumber

  is fare more solid than a Communion wafer

  but not by much,

  the scrumptious scone with its swirl of

  strawberry jam and topknot of

  clotted cream.

  The elixir of Earl Grey, English

  breakfast, or Lapsang souchong

  glints its amber stream into the

  eggshell porcelain,

  and so near “two old ladies over a

  cup of tea.”

  The Grasshopper

  A concert pianist and interpreter

  of Tchaikovsky, my soigné cousin Christine

  was a graduate of Juilliard (appoggiatura).

  A great favorite of mine, she confided

  in me (in every way still a girl)

  of her dates, her heartaches, her crushes.

  Then she was engaged—

  and Jean-Pierre was divine.

  The two lovebirds asked me along on an excursion

  to New York City at night.

  We went to a club to hear

  Ahmad Jamal—the great jazz pianist (glissando).

  I, age ten, went wide-eyed at the sounds of Jamal,

  second in influence only to Charlie Parker,

  and astonished at the people who came to hear him.

  Jean-Pierre ordered, and I was served

  in a tulip glass a frothed-topped pale green liquid.

  Jamal on the keyboard and the bass

  braided their intricate patterns (fortissimo/pianissimo).

  I lifted the tulip glass and quaffed.

  I jammed … then dipped, and went stuporous,

  on my first grasshopper cocktail.

  Art Is Not a Brassiere

  Do not imagine that art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French for life-jacket.

  —Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

  Narrow brickwork facades trellised

  with fire escapes,

  new immigrants seethed with expectancy from

  the shtetl

  once, overwhelmed with aspirations

  from
Magna Graecia.

  Arrive, chic boutiques, cafes that grind-

  to-order beans for a cup of coffee,

  apotheoses, storefronts that house fabric

  dealers and zipper wholesalers,

  another outpost for the New York City

  art scene. Not the Lower East Side knish;

  rather, the LES’s nonrepresentation, indebted

  to Kazimir Malevich and Derrida,

  paved over the echoes of pushcarts, polyglot din.

  In a gallery, a Bulgarian who wasn’t an émigré

  until the late Reaganite

  is having an opening, and speaks volubly

  about the silences in his paintings.

  Ne Plus Ultra

  Marking Mimi’s launch for Moscow to write a soap opera set in the Crimean War

  A femme party this day in the luxe precincts

  of Caviar Russe:

  a banquette facing the smoky-azure Russian

  fairy-tale murals,

  a flute of a chilled pink champagne to toast

  womanhood,

  served two spoons of beluga, shimmery,

  delectable sea pearls.

  Savor upon blini, upon toast, upon, yes,

  a sliver of potato,

  caviar in a bath of crème fraiche and

  a sprinkle of fresh chives,

  explosive in the mouth, and the burst

  is voluptuous.

  My, but the ladies in question today are

  sybarites.

  Then a portion of smoked salmon melting

  like butter on the tongue,

  gourmandizing, splurging feeds more

  than physical hunger.

  A maître d’ comes to the table to further

  cosset them.

  He hovers; they’ll have warm, buttery blini

  to enfold salmon morsels,

  this “Hermitage of an Eatery,” this refuge

  from pedestrian dissonance,

  an afternoon like being dropped into a celebration

  by Tolstoy.

  The ladies, writers, sally forth to pen

  luxuriant prose.

  Reverie

  An upstairs room that serves a high tea

  is all chintz and cabbage roses and passementerie.

  Cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off,

  A hurricane shade dims the light soft.

  A complex oolong or a flute of champagne?

  Deciding on a cherry-stem tisane.

  The city’s Klaxon is shuttered, halt,

  a distant confetti blowing the asphalt.

  A truant from matronly vocations

  wrinkles potions and taxpayer obligations.

  A smidge of strawberry jam for the currant scone,

  a morsel of sugar-sweet delectation known—

  piquancies beguiling so delicately

  falling into a state of quixotry.

  In full knightly armor, you materialize,

  and I’m castles in Spain in the skies.

  Noble sir, you adore me, you my flirtation.

  This madness à deux lasts as long as libation.

  A worldly waiter conjures the addition,

  urban time-card punches inhibition.

  Still, Lucullan pleasures stirs the juices,

  knowing tasteful titillation’s uses.

  A semidomesticated male can here be bombastic,

  so dining out on make-believe’s fantastic.

  Barcarole

  He, born under the sign of Leo, who must be feted

  in the once upon a time of Tehran, Iran.

  She, born a Libra, a wife’s delectation,

  tho’ she needs to call upon viziers.

  Shah on the Peacock Throne appears dynastic;

  years before overthrown,

  a breakfast cart is wheeled to a room in the Hilton

  with a panorama,

  sprawled white city, pierced by turquoise domes,

  iced confection of cake and chilled champagne

  for a birthday revel prefatory to a drive

  to famed archaeology, Persepolis.

  O Cyrus, O Darius, we come bearing this news

  after 2,500 years.

  A revolution’s time lapse to Central Park, New York City,

  a deck with aquatic view and two rum Tom Collins,

  sultry, late summer at the boathouse, her reserve

  fare American, prefatory to a placid gondola’s ride

  on the lake,

  our gondolier passing under a stone bridge,

  the cantare’s birthday song—

  felice, echo, compleanno a lei, echo, felice, felice.

  O Frederick Law Olmsted, we come celebratory,

  travel sated, but not jaded,

  enjoying his felicitous natal day.

  Urban Homesteading

  A jab of chemical,

  the handyman Brassos, the entrance railing

  bricks in rusty-red registers,

  punch-holed with reflective window ports,

  the polar masquerade of air conditioners

  in flush-set oblongs.

  Step down into a checkerboard lobby

  with a dusty savanna of planter ferns

  Once, Conestogas drawn by yoked oxen

  cut a pioneering swath of track

  across plains—

  the loam so fertile, rich, and depthless.

  Now, a prewar Otis (numerously mechanic-ed),

  hoists upward a dozen floors,

  urbanite paranoia of locks

  keyed open to the welcoming familiar,

  a cubby of an apartment’s refuge

  from a native’s love-hate relationship

  with strumpet-goddess Manhattan,

  her extremes of wealth and want,

  her million price-tagged opiates

  against life’s capricious transience.

  Blizzard Day: New York

  It doesn’t fall—it pounds itself

  crystalline white wall descended,

  the skyscrapers rising up from

  the snowbanks like Legos,

  momentary luminescence, the crust’s crunch.

  Sounds of the city in snowfall

  muffle or grow tinny thin.

  Then comes the grating noise

  of the unmucking metropolis,

  the Department of Sanitation’s

  mechanized onslaught.

  Finally, it’s glazed grime—a floe with

  cigarette butts down the gutters.

  Once pristine, in pockets around the tree planters,

  a dog peed,

  numbing puddles at the curbs.

  Then it’s all memory and

  salt bleach on the sidewalks until

  the meteorologist’s awaited next

  gloomsday report (except for

  the children, for whom it’s been

  snow, beautiful snow, sno’ school).

  The Big Bang

  Some enactments come with a caveat:

  a gun will be fired at this performance,

  beware, Lisel shall murder Liselotte;

  the stage directions demand conformance;

  the plot machine has its devices;

  at curtain call, our heroine arises.

  Not all life’s theater gives warning

  a gun will be fired at this performance.

  Varied machinations are aborning.

  A dramaturge devises a play’s adornments.

  Let the audience yen surprises.

  Death comes in sundry guises.

  Existence is but an entr’acte.


  A gun will be fired at this performance.

  The prime mover merely autodidact,

  this mise-en-scène only torments,

  plodding minds meaning surmises,

  fool’s genius absurdity realizes.

  Our Town

  Cat’s paws leaving their imprints

  on the sidewalk,

  ladies shod by skyscraper

  engineers

  pooling of feet on Forty-Sixth

  off Broadway

  when with the abracadabra

  of the Nederlanders,

  of Disney, of Jujamcyn,

  of the Shuberts

  it is a night of marquees,

  billboards

  all to advertise entrée

  into the the-a-tah.

  Escapist/realist/revivalist/

  cutting edge,

  star-studded/ingénue/

  method/Adler coached

  Yale tryout/imported

  via Hollywood,

  attending, we are descended

  from the ancient Greek chorus

  or spoken to, perhaps, through

  the imagined fourth wall.

  We may exit wrung out or

  whistling,

  provoked or cavorted, bored

  or blaspheming.

  Minerva’s mural on the ceiling,

  the Broadway production

  has the klieg light of all

  Times Square.

  The Brandenburg Concertos: Snowy Manhattan

  Whirling dance of snow flurries

  serpentining the park’s drive to Lincoln Center,

  on the divide has been left a bicycle.

  The bicycle’s sheath of ice and icicle

 

‹ Prev