Manhattan Melody
Page 4
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