The actress living in my building

Her face was as grossly real and surreally artificial as an impressionist painting, her makeup the colors of rugged flesh cheeks, blood purple lips, sky blue eyelids. The ridges of age, running down like rivulets, curved around her mouth thin and red-black like knife slashes. Her eyes, though rimmed with pink, were clear azure and pearl-white, her eyelashes long slivers of black. Then, standing beside her at the checkout in the Red Apple in 1979, I noticed the orange-red nails below her bent knuckles,  heard them click over and over against the dozens of cans of chicken and tuna catfood that this day, as most days, were perhaps her only purchase, perhaps her only reason to ride the elevator, limp toward the lobby door and face the world.

Dream House

Dream House

The house is a memory.
He  built it and thought,
“This is where I'm going to die,
Where I can smell the sea
and live in my dream each day.”
He made it from old plans which he perfected
with a casted arm he'd twisted
and a mechanic he'd fired
and a wasted silence
more than ruining a week's vacation;
with stolen German army boots
and a black eye,
and a stinking brother's secret
and a broken racing cart;
with a kind girl's shaking, bobbing hair
and the breath of a deadbeat uncle
who lived in the living room
and shot rockets on Sundays.

Written in pencil in his carpenter’s manual:
“To build a house,
discard unused materials.”
There they all were,
the slag, the black mud,
the stripped bolts and half-rotted floorboards,
the foundation of dust.

In new blades of the sea-fed
blue-green lawn
In the skylights and burnt ceilings
In bleached wood and white breezes

There in the empty new house
they echoed,
“What else? What else?”

Belafonte

We saw Harry in the 1970s in an outdoor arena setting, a performance venue between Buffalo and Rochester, NY. He was in his beautiful prime, his skin like golden sand, his humming voice a swoon, a flowing tremor of coffee and rum,, his hair still black back-lit with lighting and sky, his black pants crisp, his shirt silken silver. I was there with five Rochester sisters, freckled and tanned, and when we knocked on his trailer and asked for a photo, he glided down and stood among them, his arms around them, him golden West Indian, them Irish tan, all bronze and earthen and night, his teeth glistening, their lips shy and pink and full.

Drawing

Drawing

I still think back to the summer before last

When I did a drawing called “Overcast.”

In Oregon’s early coastal morning

Sliding, driving, yawning, longing

For some bacon at a diner I find

The plump blond waitress comes around

With a menu and I order home fries

And a muffin, bacon on the side

I leave her a good tip and nod at the couple

Across the aisle eating grits she supple

Him very thin their motorbike leaning

On a stand; back in the rental car, careening

Left and right, empty row

Of curb leading to Tom’s studio,

Almost alone, the old part of town empty,

The car we call pimpmobile parks by

An old tree, the studio cold

My work yet to be done, untold

Far away from home a bit confused

I wash my hands close my eyes find the muse

One called The Ladder, and one very small

With squiggles like sperm called “Embryos”

And then there’s “Overcast,” with hues

Or rather splats of wet pastel I’ve never seen

Before and I’ll fly home and  I’ll wonder where I’ve been.

Confetti

His arm in the air, it was a salute, a defiance, a wave, a plea, a prayer, an accusation, a search, a release, a yielding, a remembrance, a regression.

And in return colors fell from the sky, attacking him, rejoicing for him, gracing him, forgiving him, blessing him, blasting him,

Preparing to cover him with everlasting memories.

Beautiful movie stars

Funny, to be blue and feeling alone with a TV and raw wet dark weather and a dying Christmas tree soon for the curb, and clicking the remote to discover, to run across, the one movie to make you cry and rid you of the blues, the perfectly written, perfectly acted, perfectly Cukor movie, The Philadelphia Story, with ageless intense pent-up feelings, smart surprising raised eyebrows, small moments of whim and wisdom and grand moments of farce and sentimentality, and with beautiful movie stars, Cary Grant at his most heroically clever, Katherine Hepburn glowing and strong and fragile and wise, and Jimmy Stewart with his great big heart and dark flashing eyes. For an hour afterwards, I’m soft and weak and as well as ever I can feel, with or without the lonely romance of two martinis.

Bad air

At JFK Airport in a plastic seat in a row of connected plastic seats in tired cavernous Terminal 4, staying out of the way of rude skycaps pushing wheel chairs, Hispanic couples with screaming babies, tall sets of thin hard young women looking to be attended and discovered by little men with paper signs scrawled with last names, plump girls with backpacks reading IPads, aged Chinese couples, I was seated beside a handsome top-heavy lad (he had a big head with a big cap, he had a booming chest but thin tapered legs) who asked me if I knew what that plant was, pointing to the window looking out on the parking lot and distant Queens. I looked around for an indoor cactus, a tall bamboo or a dancing lady in a stone vase, but only saw a design on the plastic window shades with a repeating pattern that reminded me of a marijuana leaf. “That plant out there,” he pointed further. A factory in the distance, smoke spewing out of fat buildings within the airport grounds. The air in the terminal was dry to my eyes which were burning and grey with artificial light that extracted the beauty out of every face around me, every bored spinning pacing tepid waiting group of passenger greeters, every dragging disappointed awkward overdrawn individual and couple arriving from Belize and San Jose and Israel and Marco Island and Port au Prince. The young man’s face, so near, had not yet lost hope, but perhaps he was bored just sitting there lost or waiting, removing himself from becoming one with the aimlessness, airlessness around him by jotting notes in a pad and generally worrying about the heavy whiteness in the sky beyond that may be a foreboding of a poisonous future.

A bottle moves

A bottle moves

It lies, unspeaking,
A model of red along a line
Of wine boxes in Spanish,
Sleeping spoons with
Its sisters and brothers
Same blood, similar casing

It’s in the kitchen
On the red and white linoleum
Watching the cooking
Sustaining, uncorked,
Waiting to be served and
To serve.

The good soldier,
It’s the quiet child at the doctor’s,
Taking the shaking screw
Stoically, even with
Accommodation, then
Drinking the fresh air

Dinner awaits.
The bottle hums a tune
Decanted in engraved
Pewter, a mistress posing
On butcher block.
Dinner awaits.

It breathes
Near the cherry unit supporting
His old friends a marble
Fish from Spain
Beach lavender
A cruel Punchinello

Those intoxications of
Another day, earlier
Cousins, grape grandparents,
Children of our earth,
Intoxications, those lovely
Times, so simple and kind.

Plumbing

Atheist

On a day when a pipe breaks or

there’s no hot water or

the toilet won’t flush

I think of the give and take of

fluids in and out of my house

and of the man or men

who have come to mend it,

the plumbers with their

wrenches and tubing and fittings

who finally attend to my need for

a warm bath and the odorless removal

of my old shit; my house is my church,

my place of prayer against disasters,

floods, decay and drowning and

given my clumsy way with practical

things, with economic survival, with

cars that wear and break, with a house

that needs care in its old age,

my plumber with his tools

on the floor in the kitchen

is my angel on his knees praying to a god

who insists only that he meet him

halfway to bliss, by grunting and sweating and

bending and solving and finally rising,

turning the faucet on and off and on,

thus satisfied with water again

flowing silently out of my house

into some place known to him

and his god, but some place

as strange to me as heaven.

Husband and wife

They didn’t so much smile as relax their lower faces, unclench their jaws. They walked with a unspoken purpose, they didn’t totter, nor did they rush. There were no words spoken between them but they could hear each other breathing, his breath occasionally making a palpable noise like a hum through his lips, and she could hear air flowing out of her nostrils, like whispers from her thoughts. If you saw them, passed them walking by, you could see their memories surrounding them, but their path was always ahead, if somewhat toward the ground as if a map were drawn for their journey in the cracks in the pavement.

On the beach

The Nude Beach Photographer

He talked with his hands.  He pursed his lips and asked questions
By tilting his head and posing to me
His shimmering, hoping eyes.

He yammered
and flapped to the next page of his book of photos,
and the next, and the next,
and told us what was on his mind when he took them.  
On a big box camera with a tripod in the sand
He leaned like a loopy clown who might drop at any minute.
We oohed at every picture.
His eyes moved to each of us
Like pointed lenses
Resting quickly.
His thoughts flew from his mouth
and we weighed them
and he watched us,
and he flipped to the next picture,
and the next.
In each there was something glowing:

Candlelight curving over black shoulders;
The echo of a young silver moon
on the sharp edge of a deck
In the darkening sea;
The teeth of an old woman
Smiling to a row of field stones, her
Straw hair in a bun;
A woman's backside upside down in a handstand
On this very beach where we now stood, a strange man
Seated beside her, reading a book.

"Look, it's 'The Story of O'!" he said;
he tilted at me for a long-last second,
That one moment when I might have been part of a beautiful picture,
and not just standing out on this beach looking in.

Dog biscuits at the wine shop

Every time I buy a bottle of wine, I ask her the date as I’m writing my check. Before she answers, I guess: January 5^th? Oh, I’m afraid so, she says as if remembering better days. That’ll be $14.03. I play along, I thought it said $12.95.  She lowers her head and raises one eyebrow, biting her tongue rather than accuse me of being an idiot. There’s a harsh chuckle trying to escape the back of her throat. Well, that’s before Mr. Cuomo gets his cut, she smirks, having made slight adjustments over the years from Pataki to Spitzer (briefly) to Patterson (almost as briefly). Oh, yes, I apologize, as if it were my fault or I was trying again to avoiding paying my state taxes. We move on to the weather. Again, I’m diplomatic, but she has none of it. Well, at least the sun is out, she says, but doesn’t sound at all pleased. Snow? I ask. That’s what they’re saying, but that’s only after the cold—the harsh chuckle has forced its way out of her tight lips. Well, I guess it’s what we can expect for Albany, I smile, apologizing for all of upstate New York and its inconveniences and miseries. As far as I know, except for a short Boston childhood she’s lived here all her life, and she has managed this little shop and has watched skies darken,  and roads freeze over, and has listened to the bad news and the dour violins on her old radio for at least 20 years. She’s known my dog, and given her treats, since Lucy was a pup, and she prefers the dog to me, even now when the poor thing is achy and cranky and bony and blind.  She’s always grudgingly pleasant, as if fighting her own will to be nice, like that stuck chuckle, but one thinks if she had her way there would be no customers—or at least no purchasers—with questions about Merlots and credit cards and demands for boxes, the only humans even worth acknowledging would at least pay in cash and would be there because of dogs, and she could ignore me while she bent down to give the dog a treat and talk to her: Now, I didn’t hear any chewing, you can do better than that. And the cranky old dog would try.

Zenith

On the small screen with curved edges and a glass surface that was olive green when dark in the middle of the dark brown squat fat console with gold knobs and a metal Zenith script plaque also gold, there were Laurel and Hardy shorts that we watched from our dusty sofa, within earshot of our mother’s kitchen noises, boiling and sautéing and bubbling, and rich smells of greasy potato pancakes or French toast at breakfast time or onions and garlic for the tomato sauce in preparation for our father’s dinner which we would eat the minute he arrived from work. We were in love with Stan and Ollie’s simple voices crackling inside the box and around the bare walls, and we smiled knowingly at their simple solutions to accidents and catastrophes that all ended happily. I think I smiled nonstop and curled my legs under a favorite wool blanket; my sister’s laugh was loud and harsh which I found to be a somewhat surprising reaction to their silliness. The windows in the room overlooking Dyckman St. from seven floors up fogged up as the hot air from the kitchen met the cold panes and condensed and the room closed in like a big cave. You couldn’t hear traffic and you couldn’t see pigeons on the ledge but you knew they were there, nonetheless. The television antenna arms pointed in a vee toward the far walls where they made sharp, long shadows which would sometimes sag and the movie would be all white and grey scratches of Laurel and Hardy’s black suits and hats running around a scratchy town, escaping from danger, making them even less real than I already saw them to be. That was the best and worst of it, how unreal they were, colorless and flat with mechanical voices that broke under the looseness of a sound tube or a loose wire. But all the same, they gave us such real pleasure that we could pretend almost anything, imagine this and that, thrills and hunger and confusion and delight, and feel safe.

Chocolate Cocoa Puffs

The Boy Scout camp, where we stayed, my father and I, with other graduating Cub Scouts and their fathers, was deep in the woods but just a short way from Hempstead Turnpike some 15 miles from home, the long strip of metal and glass, car dealers and diners and electronics mom-and-pops and an amusement park called Jolly Roger, a road barren of homes and grass and sidewalks, but the woods were deep and claustrophobic. It rained at night ticking on the tent top and soaking the ground beneath our cots. We had managed a fire in a barbeque pit, or rather my father did. He managed a lot for me when I was disinclined to manage for myself, or was in a mood, or was unable to express my anxiety, but I don’t remember feeling safe nevertheless or comforted by the struggles of other tented fathers and sons barely visible in the woods around us. Lying in our cots we didn’t speak, my father smoked a Camel and doused it in the mud beneath his cot and perhaps he slept for a while, and perhaps I did and perhaps I cried or wondered where I could go in the dark and breathe and run and I groped around in my pajamas in the rain in the dark, looking for the mess hall to go pee. In the morning we broke down the tent, or rather my father did, and we went to breakfast in the nearby hall from which I had retraced my steps the night before and gotten lost along the wet ground and among the tents of other fathers and sons, now missing our tent as almost a home, missing my father's silence. My father ate a big breakfast and went out to smoke in a misty morning while I opened a small box of Chocolate Cocoa Puffs and smelled its contents and poured them into a cereal bowl with milk and tasted them, the sense of them mixed with the spin of the passing Hempstead Turnpike cars from the height of the roller coaster at the Jolly Roger, the heavy haze of Camel smoke in the car ride home, my rank wet clothes, my usual summer headache in my temples, down my throat, I remember clearly as if it were now, but clearest is the memory of the smell and taste of  wet Cocoa Puffs against my dry tongue and around my teeth just this moment closing around me.