Manhattan Melody
Page 1
MANHATTAN
MELODY
Patricia Faith Polak
Copyright © 2017 Patricia Faith Polak.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
1 (888) 242-5904
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5386-7 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5387-4 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5388-1 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916667
Archway Publishing rev. date: 11/14/2017
CONTENTS
Practicing One’s Craft
Zum Zum
The Classical Age
Write as Rain
Tempo of the City
Mornings at Seven
Nocturne
The Bronze
Vignettes
Allies Day: Childe Hassam
Heavy Metal
The Boulevardier’s Dawn / Cocktail Hour
Pictures at an Exhibition: New York City
Some Irreparable Loss
The Gothamburg Bible
Can You Hear Me, Watson?
The Gypsy Teakettle
Urban Landscape: The Metropolitan Museum
Photomontage: Bleecker Street
Elegy in a City Boneyard
Vincero
The World’s Oldest Writing in the Trade Tower Holocaust
The Aberrant Storm
Carousel in Winter
Toni
Buskers
Bubble, Bubble
To Jumble
If, by Chance
Dolce Far Niente
The Saint’s Day Party
Eight O’Clock
The Grasshopper
Art Is Not a Brassiere
Ne Plus Ultra
Reverie
Barcarole
Urban Homesteading
Blizzard Day: New York
The Big Bang
Our Town
The Brandenburg Concertos: Snowy Manhattan
Twenty-Four-Dollar Real Estate
The City Karooms across My Bedroom Wall
Portrait
Vantage
Nighthawks (1942)
Ferries
Rain Tattoo
Dedication
To: Emil J.
Always Believer
Cliffie
brother taken by leukemia
Inspiring Angel
Donald
once physics major
Haunting brotherly part of me
Acknowledgments
For my parents: Ruth Barbara and Joseph Patrick Leuzzi
You gave a legacy of words, and
fashioned me a debutante
Ever gratitude for the refined intellect of Sister Dorothy Mercedes of the Sisters of St. Joseph, debating coach at The Mary Louis Academy. Kudos to those dauntless ones, ever tried to teach me to sit a saddle. Exuberant riding in the Moscow Hippodrome, and being part of a Polish wedding on horseback. (Jumping Captain Protein!) A modicum of political science in the classroom at Trinity College, Washington, DC, and on Capitol Hill. Worked in the world of finance. If no fulsome pension from the years with Brahmin John Train, inculcated to write a lyric with “strong muscular verbs.” Enormous indebtedness for the academic welcome given at SUNY Empire, and the many kindnesses shown by alumni administrator, Toby Tobrocke—veritably life changing. From Manhattanville’s Master’s program, an experience in erudition and elegance, Suzannah Lessard; and tragically passed too soon, the exceptional mind of John Herman.
Thanks to friends extraordinary in their own rights—Mimi Leahey and her highly talented spouse Scott Nangle, Portia Redfield, Linda Sullivan; and cousins Therese Southworth, Carolyn Rose Vadala, and wishing the distance nearer, Paula and Susan Sonnichsen. Heartfelt credit to a brilliant doctor, Daniel Goodman, MD. Truly missed the late Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Bass and Lucia Capodilupo, PhD. For generosity enabling us to expatriate to Sayville, Long Island, and living space (to work on the novel!), Bill Venegas. Finally, paws, from a Bowser Great Beyond, Ginger and Cupid; and now the rescue felines—Flash and Foxy—think iambs are catnip.
Manhattan Melody
Of the book’s fifty poems, eighteen have been previously published in the following journals.
Art Is Not a Brassiere
Caveat Lector
Dolce Far Niente
Word(s) 77
The Saint’s Day Party
Forge
Eight O’Clock
Inkwell
Heavy Metal
Big Scream
Mornings At Seven
Land of Compassion (online)
Nighthawks (1942)
2 Bridges Review
Nocturne
Big Scream
Portrait
Land of Compassion (online)
Some Irreparable Loss
Big Scream
The Big Bang
Word(s) 77
The Boulevardier’s Dawn / Cocktail Hour
Home Planet News Online
To Jumble
2 Bridges Review
Urban Homesteading
Great American Poetry Show
Vantage
Home Planet News Online
Vignettes
Land of Compassion (online)
Zum Zum
Wild Violet (online)
Twenty-Four-Dollar Real Estate
Land of Compassion (online)
Ferries
Collection of the Ellis Island Museum
Introduction
With my husband of forty-eight years, it’s been a magic carpet ride.
This book includes poems about New York by a native New Yorker. There have been Walt Whitman, Richard Wilbur, Djuna Barnes, Allen Ginsberg, Hettie Jones, and Marie Howe. But this New Yorker has played roulette in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. Manhattan looked more sublime, more diverse. Another time, I quick-talked my husband out of jail by the Black Sea c
oast, where the Roman poet Ovid was exiled. New York appeared more myriad in its wonders, contradictions. And we smuggled a pony-sized bottle of Chartreuse into Muammar Gaddafi’s dusty, dry Benghazi, Libya, to celebrate a wedding anniversary. Returning, New York City was replete with originalities, distinctions.
While not all my travel has been to obscure and dangerous spots around the globe, this eventful life has given me such appreciation of New York.
To follow, my lyrics on my city.
Practicing One’s Craft
Ocean liners and ferries, fire tugs and yachts—
axiomatic: this town’s an island,
ensconced on Sutton Place, watching
a barge broach the East River,
a denizen of Riverside Drive voyeuring
a ketch upon the Hudson,
a dweller in Battery Park City battening on
a coast guard cutter patrolling
New York Harbor.
Sculls dip under the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge with
a stroke of luck.
Oysters again bed down in the reclaimed
Hudson River.
Water taxis, day liners, sightseeing boats,
and sails commingle.
Tankers ply the estuary with sloops
and flippant Chris-Craft.
Prolific progeny of Henry Hudson’s
Half Moon and Giovanni da Verrazzano’s
La Dauphine,
or, as the RMS Queen Mary 2, when you’ve
debuted in New York, you’re launched.
Sardined on the subway, the city is
a petrological,
intimate isle, as if 1.6 million castaways
weigh anchor, straphanger; Manhattan’s
pond is not for small fry.
Zum Zum
The hot chocolate sipped at Schrafft’s,
the nickel’s worth of mac and cheese
at the Automat—
the bygone watering holes that only linger
in the adipose tissue.
My working life coincided with the launch
of a wurst purveyor with kraut or not
and mustards, birch beer, and
upon tap, hiel und dunkle.
Found about Manhattan, one Zum Zum was
niched in the concourse of the then
Pan Am Building.
A steady traffic of business types came
to be served by dirndl-clad waitresses
in the blond-wood setting on the
appealing pewter plates and heavy
glass mugs.
Partake of the pungent crisp of the grilled wurst
skins, the vinegar of the accompanying
potato salad.
Before the cell phone and the text message,
patrons were seen doing the Times
crossword puzzle while munching a
baurenwurst or chatting a server while
nibbling a brat.
Zum Zum’s stacked decorative tuns of beer—
this wasn’t a martini drinker’s hidey-hole—
Gretchen or Liesl pulled a foamy, and it
washed down the meal.
Somehow, the freundlich was replaced by
the power lunch or, at the opposite extreme,
fast food.
We saw the wurst, and it’s gotten worst.
The Classical Age
Almost slag, the sooty February remnants of city snow,
anthracite mountain of the building’s compacted, bagged
garbage.
The upscale scavenger of our midden.
Her belted trench coat, slouch-brim hat, aviator wrap
sunglasses … only
the accessorizing wheely grocery cart, clown smear of
red lipstick,
wristlet-length gloves on, she mines the pile for
aluminum cans,
anemic sunlight as the cart layers the varicolored logos
of competing soft drinks.
Dribbled embarrassment of detritus into the slush:
apartment 7K’s ripped junk mail, somebody’s emptied
fifth of Absolut, pizza crust with toothy dentation.
And then a glimpse into the woman’s head beneath the
slouch-brim; the filling cart elicits a rictus of
painted smile
In ancient Athens, the vote to expel from the city by
casting bits of broken pottery, the ostraka, and
hence our “ostracize.”
Here, the supermarket calculates refundable nickels.
Write as Rain
The tropical steaminess of a late summer’s
cloudburst,
Manhattan as sauna,
asphalt bubbly,
humid, wilting …
plonk;
city street as caldera …
plonk, plink.
Tar pit of the construct mammoth.
Sweltering,
vaporous,
the rubbery smack of tire track …
splash, backsplash,
slurred traction,
aquaplane,
skidsy.
Step, splosh.
Tempo of the City
A near horizon whose sharp jags
Cut brutally into a sky
Of leaden heaviness, and crags
—Amy Lowell, “New York at Night”
A Manhattan moonrise hangs above
the skyscrapered city
like a snowball tossed by a perturbed Rip Van Winkle.
Flakes stir and fall in the canyons of Wall Street,
tickertape confetti—crystals as ephemeral as a stock tip.
The storm-covered equestrian statue of the first president
in Union Square is a horsey snowman.
Pedestrians hunker down behind ski masks and cautiously
navigate slick sidewalks.
A traffic jam at a slush-soupy corner, and from a car’s window
is heard the radio with the Village People’s “YMCA”;
most passersby respond to the lyric’s up beat and are energized,
some even smiling as they jump the corner’s icy pool:
“Y-M-C-A.”
Rhythmic weatherproofing.
Mornings at Seven
City blocks with donuteries, druggeries, and dry cleaners;
air temperate, as if March had rinsed it,
pounded it against the travertine on skyscrapers
until it was like a favored pair of jeans.
Urbanites unbundling, turtling out
from wools and downs,
the mind itself shedding torpor,
senses keening, synapses firing.
In the indestructible gingkoes along the avenue
adjacent to the thrum of traffic,
a plaint of sparrows, managing in this metropolis,
the mate and nest mandate.
Talismanic spring light, like Eurydice
emerging from the underworld—
in front of a florist,
impervious to the capriciousness
of the city’s seasons,
flowering quince in a galvanized pail,
all gossamer orange-pink and cinquefoil petals
tempting a splurge,
so for a fragile day an indoor garden,
an unalloyed delight,
amid the Barnes chairs, dhurries, and Dali lithographs.
Nocturne
When the sunset has squandered itself and
the city’s sky deepens to what lyricists call
indigo,
car lights flash on, weaving ribbon candy:
headlamps peppermint,
taillights disappearing cinnamon,
homebound pedestrians footslogging.
Neon’s luciferous
crazy quilt of signage, billboards
is intensified by gridlock;
police/fire/ambulance, frenzied sound and light,
taxis blinker on- and off-duty,
vans spray-painted DayGlo.
Passing buses filling lanes,
commuters’ glazed stares at
a window dresser’s fantasies.
Intersections jammed, horns discord:
flourishes of automotive
cornets, flugelhorns, euphonium.
The rampage exhausts eventually.
Anticipate the moonrise,
a flimsy disk (dish-faced moon) vying with the
illuminated metropolitan night.
The Bronze
In the sunlight-flooded park where the nannies go,
which overlooks a gentle bend of the East River,
there is a sculpture of a monumental wild boar;
upon his bronze haunch, and mild-miened,
he oversees the prams and strollers,
toddlers, and sturdy-gaited children
out for the air and doing their first socializing,
while the minders observe upon park benches
the eddying river wide across to Queens,
this enclave where ivied bricks screen the luxury high-risers.
Then a boy of about four, with tousled blond hair,
rushes to show his nanny something.
It’s possible to make out their conversation is in Creole,