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.