Manhattan Melody
Page 3
cozy of Brits, chatty and vintage Diana.
A trio from Chappaqua doing lunch and Italian portraiture,
they’re matched blondes in Fair Isle sweaters, majors in art at Wellesley.
Iranian American of great, almond black eyes here for a talk on Persian painting,
a stunning woman from Dahomey in yellow, green, and white robe and turban.
He’s in suit or jeans and backpack
from China’s far Canton (Guangzhou) or nearby Connecticut,
and he must see the Met’s Rembrandts … van Goghs …
the medieval armor … the musical instruments.
A culture-craving mother with stroller-ensconced toddler,
the paired columns of the entryway and beyond—
banners that fly just beneath the pediment advertising exhibits
of ancient Roman glass, Flemish art, Indian miniatures, calligraphy of Japan.
No Daumier of today for the Met’s tableaux?
Surely a scene able to be captured (or has been) by a Red Grooms.
The picture outside the picture galleries within.
Photomontage: Bleecker Street
Gauzy ceiling of smoke hovering beneath the stamped tin
—Ballistic missiles in equipoise
Walls glazed ochre by tobacco, and from habitués,
a gilding of cannabis
—Cover story in the post-Sputnik era,
“Why Johnny Can’t Read”
Pungent, foamy cappuccino
—Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon in Moscow
for the Kitchen Debate with Nikita Khrushchev
Rack of dowels holding Le Figaro
—Generation gyrating to a close with a hula hoop
Discs of Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, and the Brit
Petula Clark (in go-go-boot syncopated French)
casting a trance.
Under the table on the checkerboard tile, a coarse-woven
Greek bag jingling tokens for the subway ride
back to the Rockaways—and she’s thumbing again
A Coney Island of the Mind,
Hullabaloo of guitar cases around the sides of the room,
on the cusp of Vietnam, when the war was
the civil rights movement,
glowering wall posters of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon,
rebelling against a parental “booboisie,”
and determined to make art, not cereal commercials,
passing on Ginsberg’s gospel,
hungering for travel. Meanwhile, this simulacrum
for a Left Bank, and no intimation destiny
might be with an M-16 to the Southeast Asian jungle
or as a fugitive to Canada.
A murmurous cutting of milk teeth on Sartre and Camus
and, more rumored than read, Naked Lunch,
and a plain-wrappered Tropic of Cancer
—the ill-omened, the Pandora’s box …
advisors sent to the Diem regime.
Counterpoint: a grassy, sweet lull in Greenwich Village.
Elegy in a City Boneyard
Suspended in the Caribbean
in a bath of sun-stirred waters,
the infinitesimal deaths of a reef,
coral branch as memento mori.
This urban flux, this tumbrel,
moon-tethered, fluctuating isle,
hurly-burly tropic, intemperately populous
crenellations in a Sargasso sky.
Elegy in a city boneyard,
to what empyrean do these souls fly?
Earthly immortality an optimal quarter hour
or not, then in perpetuity, atoms’ effluvia.
Thy sting is unabated.
Lie about the hereafter, Fabricating Man.
Vincero
Of rumor: “Signore, ascolta!”***
On the bill is Turandot.
A necessity of sustaining,
entr’acte coffee and salmon sandwich
are taken regimental style—
elbows tucked,
standing at the Met’s
dress-circle champagne-and-viand
pedestal tables.
Then a sumptuary pause,
overheard conversation:
He: “Did you know Callas swallowed
tapeworms to get thin for Onassis?”
She: “Imagine that love!”
He: “Ruined her voice and beyond,
arrive Jacqueline.”
She: “But for a time … Callas’s incredible
voice, acting, and beauty.”
He: “Onassis wanted for himself a
goddess the world would worship,
and that she would die for him!”
She: [tipping back her flute of champagne]
“Vincero.”****
The World’s Oldest Writing in the Trade Tower Holocaust
With the beginning of these tablets, you can say that history begins.
—John Russell, Professor of Art History
When nearly nothing was predictive
of the horrific attack on the
World Trade Towers on a
morning of unsuspect blue,
imaginably, something talismanic
upon a clay tablet—
quote: Long after Enlil built the temple
to Ninlil a great firestorm will come, but
these words will not perish.
362 clay tablets and plaques from
ancient Iraq of 2030 BC
would survive 9/11.
Sumer, capital of empire.
Looted from South Iraq, the customs service
received a tip—two boxes of
“clay objects” out of Syria were
being smuggled from Dubai
via Newark.
Sumerians of Mesopotamia.
Customs examined and found the
artifacts smaller than a
playing-card deck.
The confiscated treasures went into
the vault basement of the
United States Customs House,
6 World Trade Center.
After the attack on 9/11, it was
found in the devastation that
the fragile tablets had been
water soaked by burst pipes
and firemen’s hoses.
The Tigris, the Euphrates: two
great rivers of the Fertile Crescent.
The objects returned to the Iraq
Embassy in Washington, DC, and
their permission was given for a
highly delicate restoration.
Eighteen months of conservancy,
and then Iraq waited until the
country stabilized before
repatriating.
Finally, the tablets were at the
Iraq National Museum in Baghdad.
Some of the cuneiform tablets held
everyday transactions:
receipts for goods and services.
Cuneiform: Arrangements of wedge-shaped
strokes of a stylus on wet clay tablets
either dried or baked.
Also, deeds, hymns, poetry, literature—
a diary of what life was like in the
Sumerian city of Ur in the valley between
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
But what particularly resonates
these millennia later is that
among the cuneiform tablets
are those with various omens predicting
the future.
From Sume
rians, the Epic of Gilgamesh,
the great flood—and then comes
the fire next time.
The Aberrant Storm
Huddled within a plywood scrim against the
cresting aberrant storm,
catastrophied houses, tide-swept memories,
drowned histories, taken lives,
askew—the disordering of existence
like the primal force laid waste,
the scaffold of the submerged world—
a Luciferian cat’s cradle of exploding transformers
pinwheeling, fireballs/gunpowder, black smoke.
Houses burn to skeletal ruin in watery graves,
recalling … the moon bringer of tides had been at its fullest that night.
Coney Island floats seaward, derelict, macabre Cyclone deaths
For the victims of Sandy
and the recovery of New York City
recalling … the moon.
Carousel in Winter
A fierce regiment, fiery phalanx,
the caparisoned charges are close upon
Central Park West,
dappleds and bays and grays, touched
with scarlet and royal blues—
fifty-eight ornate, mountable steeds and two
flamboyant chariots,
horses’ arched necks, bits between teeth, stirrups,
and the merry-go-round’s golden poles.
Skeletal overhang of tree branches,
the winter brown of the lawn,
nimbostratus-dulled sky, and the weather
report is snowy.
Amusement from the atelier of the Artistic
Carousel Manufacturing Company,
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1908,
Solomon Stein and
Harry Goldstein’s creation—at first
on Surf Avenue, Coney Island,
fallen into storage until emplaced
in 1951 as ornaments of Olmsted’s design
three-quarter-scale mechanized prancers like a Lilliput
king’s stable.
To ride, to spin, to pump up and down,
to rejoice in the carousel’s music
cymbals and drums, stirring and martial,
unique to the ear
in the cold air is the merry-go-round’s calliope
clarion.
Even an exotic flourish of wild, striped
tiger appears
against the day’s drabness; this is New York City,
Technicolor—and the cost: two dollars.
An anecdote in the history of the attraction:
Jacqueline Kennedy inquired of the
operator if she must pay to watch
Caroline and John ride.
I watch the delight of children
today attired for the gallop in snowsuits, wool caps,
and mittens,
the bewitching of a romantic love upon a steadfast
mount’s saddle.
All but the most inclement weather, and the
merry-go-round
in Central Park, revolves and, revolving,
resolves some of
the cares of a burdened heart.
Toni
The inaugural sleepaway coincided with that
epic in Americana, the televised Miss America Pageant,
the ménage à deux or à trois arriving with jammies,
recumbent, ranging the RCA, they readied for the
avuncular Bert Parks to rhapsodize.
While perhaps a Miss Rheingold was on the
New York City subways and local beauty queens,
there weren’t the rivaling Miss USA,
Miss Universe, Miss Teen, and the plethora of
airbrushed supermodels and cotton-tailed
Playboy centerfolds.
Miss America was beauty and baton twirling—
face, figure, poise, talent.
The tweens rapt, if giggly, picking favorites—
applauding and booing as the judges
narrowed the field
absent today’s cynicism, advertising for a
captive female audience.
And nothing went so much with pageant and Parks
as the Toni home permanent.
By association, with that little kit with its rods and
chemicals, one would gain not only glossy curls
but Miss Oklahoma’s operatic talent—the “Bell Song”
from Lakme.
The sleepaway has become more raucous.
Miss America has lost allure … or is it age?
Things just aren’t as Toni anymore.
Buskers
Jiving the Fifth Avenue corner
of Bergdorf,
an alto sax is peddling up
and a blues man
laying
down
a scat line
in the mighty dollary a.m.
Armani
suit is crossing the pavement
with Jimmy Choo
and not a dime outta
Prada
for “Lover Man,”
so Billy—
hex their day,
but then Cin-
cinnati or Seattle
does a little
finger click,
gives a listen and a
fin
from the tourist,
and man,
it’s sound.
Bubble, Bubble
Conformist in most regards
yet admittedly wanting effect
and open to amicable intervention
otherworldly,
this town’s overrun by psychics.
I’ll stay aloof from past lives,
leave anticipation to season the future;
however, not gainsaying Shakespeare,
where’s the witches?
No confidence in dialing up Wicca,
looking for a consummate conscienceless crone,
there’s a shortlist of witchery I’d want,
an enchantment
a mere hex or two.
There are obtainable allurements,
vacancies for reigning princesses—
though time’s against me, so somewhere,
keep the caldron lit.
The Figure 5 in Gold
Charles Demuth’s tribute to William Carlos Williams
integer, integral
5s racing forward in space and receding
versifier, verismo
smell the incandescent clang
the scoping engine eyes
motive, kinetic
splash/gash/splat red
cipher, enciphered
hypnotic, mimetic
fusillade of 5s
pulsate, figurate
glittery, gleaming
power, penta
rays of light infusing
To Jumble
The ATM screen displays characters spelling twenty-five
different languages
to make a banking-friendly experience of a deposit
for a Bengali,
just as well a withdrawal transacted in Serbo-Croat.
Perhaps repressed, I don’t attempt
to check my balance or make a transfer to my
money market in Russian.
For all I know, transliterating, I might be a ruble billionaire.
The parable of the city and its tower is that God’s anger
grew at the attempt to build up into the heavens.
God scattered the peopl
e of the city upon the earth and
confused their languages.
Balal in Hebrew is the word for “to jumble.”
This gives to English our word babble—to talk irrationally,
crazy talk.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1568 painted his famous
Tower of Babel, based upon the Colosseum in Rome.
Two hundred years later, the master engraver Gustav Doré gave
another riveting image in The Confusion of Tongues.
Go back, perchance, to that far-distant past of 1965,
a benchmark Boomer year.
Predict that it will be good customer PR at your local
Chase or Citi.
To have Fukienese to work out your overdrafts,
babble on
If, by Chance
The numbers, but within memory,
fantasy, were a shared ticket on the
Irish sweepstakes.
Now billboards blazon a variable
figure in the neighborhood of
a quarter billion dollars.
Not so long past are lottery’s beginnings,
and a million-dollar winner
asked if he’d quit his job.
Segue to the commercial, and He is
arguing with She over her
spending winnings on a
pool boy.
The Lotto-carney, an Everyman,
is stopping traffic, silencing
the opera, emptying
the prizefight ring
googly eyed, announcing jackpots.