Manhattan Melody

by Patricia Faith Polak

  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.