like Jack Frost’s ten-speed,
Bach’s music soars the mind to a higher place.
Fears of cycles of terror—a young North Korean
tyrant has killed his uncle and advisor,
a spirited chase: the dramatic arc from first concerto
to last.
Unpredictably, the world is smaller from an execution
in far North Korea.
Sole ruler/virtuosic soloists, soullessness/scintillating
starvation/Johann Sebastian—
one restraint less to launch a missile with a warhead;
playing with annihilation,
driven frozen pellets into which we exit Alice Tully Hall.
Local broadcast journalism covers Macy’s extended hours,
those of Toys“R”Us
theoretically—SpongeBob SquarePants’s tricycle this year’s
must-have.
Security steps in at a festering dispute at Target.
The Bach concertos—supreme examples of Baroque instrumental
music—were once valued at only a few cents (four groschen)
each.
Dennis Rodman organizes in the isolationist
and totalitarian state of North Korea, a
basketball game for leader Kim Jong-un’s birthday.
A total glacier in relations, the US/North Korean diplomatic
Dennis Keith Rodman, notably, is the single visible link.
The Brandenburg Concertos offer a consummate chance for
interpretation, like great Shakespeare.
Twenty-Four-Dollar Real Estate
Sluiced from the plane into the terminal,
impatient to breathe unpressurized air,
swarm outside for a ride in hobbled traffic,
Queens bathed in cars’ noxiousness and hum.
The vertiginous bridge route over the East River,
there in the sunlight skyline, Manhattan
scissoring haphazardly into the milky sky,
glint, thrust, vaunt
colossi footed in bedrock
(archi)tectonic,
a mirage island of every trade route
postindustrial caravanserai,
evidencing its acme and polyglot—
quintessential metropolis.
The City Karooms across My Bedroom Wall
In the yellow of stinging bees, rain slickers, and
black-eyed Suzie’s petals,
a taxicab is racing nighttime to a metered destination
for the right-side
photograph; hindquarters foremost, a monocular-eyed
hack
is haunting center-ground, a ghostly stalagmite
skyline,
a rocket-like silhouette tower, within its spheres
of influence.
Scene left is pinioned by a detective blue squad car,
red summoning roof lamps
driving away toward the crime and criminals of the
Brobdingnagian town,
dishing up this camera shot of Manhattan, a dominant
half-dollar.
Con Ed’s manhole cover adds its argent to this tableau
like a spun disc.
Within the walnut frame and the fat white mat, a half-lyric
then
“… make it anywhere, New York” pixilates the contours
of the room.
Portrait
Passegiata, a noontime circuit of my city blocks—
presto, the light changes, and the promenade halts
alongside as the crosstown traffic guns.
A boy with a ferret on his head
I ask: the boy’s Bob, and the ferret (with his tiny
collar and leash) is Jack.
He’s a great pet and very smart and, Bob adds,
likes to be taken for an airing.
The light goes green, and Bob steps off.
I’m suddenly thousands of miles away in Krakow,
Poland, before
Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine,
the teenage beauty clasping the golden ermine
probably Cecilia Gallerani,
the mistress of il Moro, Ludovico Sforza, Milan’s
ruler.
The painting, bought in 1800 by Prince Adam Czartoryski
for the family collection,
has survived, the best of Leonardo’s works, after
five hundred years.
A tootle of car horns brings me back from reverie.
I see that, oblivious to the karooming of cabs’
and buses’ metallic rattle,
Bob walks on amid the lunch-hour pedestrians,
Jack alert, forward looking on Bob’s head
the ferret’s tail an undulant S down the boy’s
neck—
boy and ferret, a small urban masterpiece.
Vantage
In the cirrus and nimbostratus and the upmost stories
of the Chrysler Building, Woolworth, World Trade
Manhattanscape is a zebra-ing of architecture and
roadways alight with talent and traffic signals.
Look-see to the harbor-lands and the flatlands, and the
outer-lands of Queens,
past Hoboken (oh! surely past), then all of New Jersey,
westward,
on northward beyond the harp strings of a bridge,
the geology of palisades, northward ever until
dissolved from sight, perhaps behind a Catskill
empyrean surfeited with demigods and muses; upon the
city are such creative urgencies: singularities,
monumentalities, hybrids of the seven arts.
Stand on this pinnacle vantage—Rockefeller Center,
Empire State Building—and vaunt, vaunt it.
Nighthawks (1942)
Edward Hopper
The four are reprised, and unasked, loneliness
diner not much different,
but the snap-brims are only a distant memory,
trademark of the ’40s man.
She’s unchanged, a redhead in a red dress that shows
a curve of milky skin.
Then she looks expectant toward the paper-capped
soda jerk
for a word passed in the emptiness of the blackout
city.
Who is with her now—who then?
Stranger? Coworker? Friend?
Lover?
Someone to make the night pass over a cup of coffee.
The solitary male figure hunkered on his diner stool—
lost in thought, observer jealous, or the other guy
a fool?
To imagine she’ll be as approachable come
work-a-day sunrise,
that counterman who wouldn’t trade his job
in the small hours
when the stories he hears get long, and sometimes
the tips big for a brew.
The only things holding back the Stygian gloom
are proximity, the four-square diner’s architecture, and joe.
Ferries
We rode the ferry in the clasp of a harvest moon—
the Staten Island ferry—
and it was a dreadnought
passing Liberty Island, a long kiss
I cuddled and yearned.
Those contradictory hours afloat,
churning New York Harbor,
the shortest, endless voyage
between terminal and terminal,
and seeing no terminus, I blurted,
“I feel immortal
!”
Don’t tempt fate en route to Staten Island.
The First Cause found cause.
College was done, and
boundless time to decide the rest.
Wow! To be at liberty in Manhattan.
And the torch I carried
Surely situated now in middle age,
freighted with regrets
while luckier in later love than deserved,
I do not dread death.
Charon and the Staten Island ferry both charge.
I only need to coin an immortal passage.
Rain Tattoo
Hard rain today, so
the jerky stop-start taxis
seem to stipple
the asphalt roadways with chrome yellow.
The street dealers mummify
with plastic sheets all
their faux Vuitton, Rolex, and Armani.
Then, as it turns to downpour,
in the doorways mushroom
umbrella entrepreneurs
(whether more to be studied by
mycologists,
meteorologists,
or investment bankers).
I, this day, am cozy,
also unsheltered, purposeless
because it was for you.
All the sensations I’d hoard,
remembered hours when,
in New York City,
the skies emptied—
eclipsed by the
emptiness of losing you.
Endnotes
* * Arabic for “Thank you.”
** Russian for “fish.”
*** “Signore, ascolta” is an arching soprano aria from Turandot, which Maria Callas made famous and recorded.
**** “Vincero”—“I have won”—is, of course, the celebrated bravura tenor aria of Turandot, upon morning’s coming and the princess not having guessed Calif’s name.
Manhattan Melody Page 5
