Community theater

In Saratoga Springs, you drive to your audition in the small theater in Saratoga Park. There’s a lush golf course now brown under pines along the entry road on the left, and the Hall of Springs classically sprawling to the right, celebrating the healing waters of Saratoga and holding, oddly, the National Museum of Dance. Once we saw Tony Bennett perform live, a courageous solo concert, bold and sweet and filled with adoration and fame. The audition I attend is quite the opposite, local and almost moribund, with that community theater taste and smell and suffocating personalities who strut and stammer, fret and flounce, waiting to read for Witness for the Prosecution. I am one of them. I recognize a few, those who recognize me pretend they don’t, while a rehearsal for a loud children’s musical yells from a nearby stage. I'm in Saratoga Springs with a Saratoga theater crowd, and some chat among themselves as I try to identify who will be vying for my role. Inside me I am quiet and tired and spent and I know I am only there to observe and walk away, there’s nothing here for me except the delight of a small place of hope and braggadocio, bad English accents and actors a bit unlovely, unglamorous and not quite compelling, and I am there to compete, and I am not.

Old friends

Wet Grass

She looked at her feet and said,

“Will there be grass at the pavilion?”

I looked ahead at the curve of the road

Around the cemetery’s huge rainy field.

I said, “I don’t know, Cliff,” (which was her old name);

“We’ll all proceed in our cars, then we’ll see;

I just don’t know about the grass.”

Her mouth was painted like a face on a cardboard canvas.

Her eyes were black marbles.

“Because,” she said, “I should change out of these,”

and she pointed down at her amber lizard-skin dress shoes.

The funeral, the widow, the old friends holding umbrellas.

And late tonight I’m thinking only about

A confused reincarnation of the old Clifton,

His big swollen feet in girls’ shoes,

The shadows of worry, the ghostly reinvention

Of the way it might have been the first time,

That is, barefoot, in the wet grass.

Her bruised black eyes

Death

I think he thought of orgasm as death
and he thought his new wife was
trying to kill him;
because just thinking about her
lips, wisps of her hair
and her bruised black eyes
made him shrivel.
He had to quiet down,
so he thought about his father
lying uncharacteristically still,
hoping death would pass him by.

Mirror in the fun house

You draw yourself with a pen, with lines, scratches, blots of black, pupils that shine and glower, lids that are heavy, a jowl, a thick chin, tufts of hair that suggest a half opened curtain, bags and shadows and accusations, an old Jew’s forehead, cheekbones with shadows that trace scars of Sicilian scorn, searching challenging hoping that the face looking back at yours might at last reveal, undeniably, a trace, if not a well, of love and accidental depth.

Near "Jaws" Bridge

Sea level

Ben,
Keep calling me
Over the swallowing sea

KingBird black-knifing through the green forest
BlackEyed hare lockjawed on the tawny drive
Friends 40 now 60 now 80

Ben,
My lighthouse my buoy my bell

My child
I see the island
As a hole in the sea

Through
The fearless mist
Keep calling me

60 State Street

The building is Beaux-Art, designed in the late 19^th century by architects York and Sawyer from New York City. The atria is a transforming place, so wide and high, broad and powerful, a grand hall of human dreams and achievement, right here in Albany. Right here on the short street of power Downtown, between the proud D&H Building at the foot to the New York State Capitol crowning the hill, it presents a façade of what Albany fails to achieve: a downtown that pays beautiful homage to its history, a living museum of old New York, its merchants and scamps, its sailors, its cobblestones, its government and money, its backroom deals and its endless, timeless river. It was an appropriate place to be hosting BUILT: Albany’s Architecture Through Artists’ Eyes, a fundraising gala for a hoary nonprofit, Historic Albany. On the old walls and on decorative presentation tables were models of tribute and idealism, photos of back street decay, drawings of contradictions and contrasts, there was bitterness, and blind love, and wistful affection, and political commentary in the form of two- and three-dimensional art, a display of the visionaries and judges, the engineers and wizards of our little art world. And there were people, hundreds of them, some of the area’s most well-heeled patronesses, some of the area’s fashionably famous artists, others historians with a passion for old buildings in need of preservation and a yearning for re-use and rejuvenation. The crowd was so genuine (mostly), the art so inventive and smart and provocative, and 60 State Street, larger-than-life larger-than-Albany York and Sawyer masterpiece, a haven of wishful thinkers, and their grand vision of what, alas, Albany could have been.

Visiting hours

Prism

There’s an attempt to make her look

alive, her hair done up,

not like she wore it

but like a ‘50s model with curls,

and there’s a blush of

make-up on her cheeks,

like a flush of orange blood.

The skin between her fingers

is papery and peeling

her nails polished with

crawling daisies painted on their tips,

and on her left hand

her diamond engagement ring

a prism of gaiety

and in a moment I’ll shake

her husband’s hand,

which is in a fist

as he stands beside her pillowed head.