Brooklyn Bridge

 Manhattan and Brooklyn are connected by threads of traffic and steel.  But Manhattan is more important.  Manhattan’s frail island is where everyone thinks they are going to when they go to New York. Dramatic dreams take place in front of great museums or on smalls streets filled with bars in the West Village.  The map of New York is not a map at all but a list of events, each one validating the giant.  But none of it is real.  New York is a city of miracles, floating delicately between the Hudson and the East Rivers, filled within the tiny squares of well-organized blocks are great stories of artists and writers and singers and dancers, gangsters who loved and lost and shot guns in Manhattan. 

            When I was young and lived in Jersey I had the same kinds of dreams.  I saved up and would come in by the Path to shows where all the bitches wore belly shirts and, though my friends got laid, I’d get too fucked up and wind up asleep on the train or puking in a garbage can or maybe the streets.  Those streets.  On those nights I’d just walk around until that morning grey permeated through the streets.  The city was my mother and the weaker I was the more she seemed to embrace me.  I could hardly walk, and the harder the streets were the more I loved them, because every one has life.  It’ll never get suckled out, not by all of New York’s children, and I knew her.  So the move here was inevitable.  Like the fucking idiot I am I didn’t even save up.  I had $20 in my pocket when I came and I thought that would be enough, at least to buy some food.              ‘What does money matter’ I thought, ‘when my name will tumble down through the East Village like Bob Dylan’s does.  What will money matter when Manhattan is in love with me?’ 

            I see them every day: the midwest, west, east, southern dreamers come to New York and realize that New York has lived passed their dreams and a newfangled glass building is being built in the place of that old tenement building where the writer wrote until four every morning for five years.  The dedication made him famous more than the writing did. 

            But they come with tattoos and the big glasses and the plaid shirts they their bags down in a leaking apartment whose monthly rent is more expensive than they are.  How could they have known how little New York cares for its own dreams much less their’s and the little dreamer is exiled to Brooklyn where they rent a flat with seven roommates.  

The Trail

The Trail

A man and a woman walked through a dense forest. The woman was in the late stages of pregnancy so she held her stomach in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. The couple was on their way back from a picnic in a maple grove and though the sun was high in the sky, the trail back was long and the man walked quickly, anxious to return to their cabin before night fell. But the woman waddled behind, admiring the vegetation on the side of the trail as she went.

“See how that flower wilts beneath those fallen leaves.” She exclaimed. “It is surely about to die. Will you please uncover it? My stomach is far too large for me to bend down so far.”

“I see the color in the sky turning to orange. The sun will go down soon and there are so many flowers in the wood. Why would the death of one make any difference to the rest of the wood?” Her husband answered.

But the woman kneaded her hands together with a pathetic look on her face as if she would never be happy again. So he grumbled and gave in, stooping down to lift the moist leaves off the flower. Immediately it lifted its little red petals that quivered with joy. It was a poppy. And the man insisted they get on their way without another stop.

They walked on, the man ahead and the woman dragging behind until the man heard his wife yelp. He turned to see her frozen in her tracks and pointing to the little stream that ran parallel to their path where a daddy long legs teetered on a piece of bark. “Oh poor spider! It’s going to fall off the bark, the stream will soon overturn it and it will die in the rapids! Will you save it? In this state, I am not fast enough to run.”

“The sky is dimming. Let’s leave the spider so we can get back to our cabin before it is too dark.” Her husband begged. But his wife wept so bitterly that he gave in and ran down the stream to retrieve the spider and place it safely back on the ground.

The two walked on and soon the man could see the trees open up at a crest on the hill where the little cabin nestled. The sky seemed misty with twilight. The moon was naked. The man heard his wife cry a third time but this time he didn’t turn around. “I see the moon.” He said. “Soon it will be too dark to keep walking.” He was so anxious to get back, and frustrated with his wife that he marched on, deaf to the silence following him, because his wife was not there.

The man walked alone until he came to an old apple tree where he almost walked over a fallen crow with her belly up to the sky. She was bleeding from her wings. A few paces away he saw her fallen nest. Next to it lay a broken egg and a chick, slimey with newness and squeaking away while its mother took her last helpless breaths. The man knew that the chick would die in the forest without its mother, so he stepped past the dying bird and knelt in front of the chick. Dirty, callused hands picked the bird up. He was a mountain compared to it. Muscles rippling on his back and hair that hung down in blond curls. The chick was the size of his thumb.

As he admired the bird he remembered his wife and looked behind him to make sure she was there, but she wasn’t. He peered at the darkening trunks to see if she might appear, but she didn’t. He looked around him and found that, in his haste, he had walked straight off the trail and was now quite lost. Keeping the chick in his hand, he circled the tree, trying to remember where he had come up to it so that he could retrace his steps back to the trail.

About to give up completely and set up a camp for the night, he heard a long moan echoing among the trees- then a cry. He recognized it and ran into the trunks towards it, the chick still enveloped between his hands. He found his wife lying on the trail to their cabin, screaming in pain. She had the same look in her eye as a dying man, recognizing something. The sweaty wrinkles in her face were a maze and he could not find its center. He didn’t know how to help her, so he watched as she screamed and when she was done, he lifted his hand to reveal the chick that craned its neck up to him. He extended his arm down to her with his other hand holding the bird. “We will take this home,” he said and a bright smile spread over her face. She put her hand in his. The moon was quite bright enough to light their trail home, and they walked on into the thicket together.

Hudson frequents the side of the pier

The boats, waves and bully winds push it,

They push the water with all that junk

Like dead fish and cigarette butts

And shredded plastic bags, to South America.

All the way down to the sun away from the cold.

The pier holds all the people who ran away from chaos

On its woody planks:

Black grey and tan.

From a far distance where the sun is headed,

A giant statue touches the clouds

The statue becomes taller than mountains from here.

A bridge that is not the Brooklyn flies

Or floats, or, held, as it were, over the bitter cold, congested water.

How good it is to leave.

Watch planes like birds,

Helicopters like beetles and the river like a long ferocious tail.

For the moment the wind pauses and the muffled voices that were being carried

Southward with the water, stop,

The languages

Hang in a mobile between one island and another.

I would rather be with no one.

Happy here on splintery planks with strangers who make solitude tangible.

German boys are wrestling.

They tackle one another in fur coats and sneakers.

They may kiss in a burst of excitement

while the grey fur pinches the red.

It always gets to be too much when you’re fighting.

A few speak French, a few speak Chinese, and those pretty Germans run away.

The Chinese family smiles and poses in front of a camera

“make picture with a view” the father says.

They hold each other’s shoulders and smile

Lake Story: A work in progress

It’s only when the sun falls beneath the layers and seas of evening’s wet color that the mosquitoes come out.  They come out by the millions, from the lake and all the hideous places of the world in which a person would stick their hand only by accident.  There are so many of the tiny insects that all you can do is watch them attack your body, in a frenzy leaving itching bumps all over.  Potter says, “It’s because you’re sweet.”  My father used to tell me that.  I never thought I tasted too sweet.  Wouldn’t I know if I was sweet?  Wouldn’t I have tasted it on my skin before?  I would imagine myself as a Dominos sugar cube, crumbling a little at the edges like they always do, but still ripe and mouthwatering.  The mosquitoes will never stop; they keep coming in constant brigades.  Sometimes one at a time, others two then they ambush all at once.  Every few seconds one of them comes by your ear screeching a whisper that feels like distant screams, a pin going through your brain, if you can imagine.  The dark has taken up so much of the sun’s hot remains that it’s become too cold to run screaming from the mosquito army and plunge, like a bedlam into the serene Vermont Lake, now transformed into a murky mass at night.

            Seven years ago was the first time I got naked with a boy.  I was thirteen.  His name was Lucas and we counseled together at a day camp that taught swimming, tag and “arts & crafts”.  It also enforced teamwork and sharing.  I would ask my mom to pick me up a few hours after the camp day had ended so that we could talk on the little beach while the sun passed away.  We gossiped about the kids and our fat boss.  He was the kind of guy who sits on a spinney office chair that creaks from his overflowing bulges of fat that make the poor chair teeter on its little wheels, dangerously threatening a colossal collapse.  We called him meatball because that’s what he looked like.  Gnarly looking skin with red bumps and dark craters, he was round like that.

            The circle of light from the fire where Potter fiddles with a couple of hot dogs seems to be all that exist in faint shadows of the forest rustling all around.  Phantom trees rise outside our white glow much higher than I remember in the daylight.

           By the lake when the second week of camp had closed, Lucas curled his red twizzler lips and through a half hopeful snigger said that I wouldn’t jump naked into the public beach at our feet.  I had never backed down from a dare.  Backing down from a dare, especially from a boy would be a sin. It was a June evening, just warm enough to wear a light sweater, it had been record low at 50 in late may.  A breath of wind brushed the tips of grass and the soaring ends of large oaks.  The adrenaline seized me up.  So this is the stuff of superheroes I thought as I took off my tattered red Abercrombie and Fitch shirt, the shirt I bought in 7^th grade, a shirt that had been worn through, never to be cool again.  Its faded strawberry color was still a little damp from sweat, caked in places with mud.  I kicked my jean shorts off my feet into the cooling sand.

            “It’s getting chilly.”  Potter hands me a paper plate with a smoky hotdog nestled between ketchup, mustard and canned corn.

            “Yeah.”

            “Do you want a sweater?”  Potter takes a black one out for me and cuddles into a knitted sweater that I have never seen him wear before.

            “Anything to get these mosquitoes off.”  I don’t know where he got that sweater.  I half suspect that he stole it from the clothing store in Lilidy where we bought the replacements for the hiking boots that never recovered from the swamp.  I grab the thick itchy sweater in hopes that it will soothe my pocked, irritated skin.  It feels like 1000 mosquito bites.  My record number of insect injuries in a summer is 300 and these past few nights have easily doubled that figure.

            At thirteen I didn’t look at him next to me - watching me - or I wouldn’t have done it.  His astounded face would whip me back to reality and then I would see myself, only a girl naked in front of a boy, pale in an early moon.  I could hardly feel the cold, only the hint of wind pushing at my numb nakedness.  I held my arms for support, making myself believe that by now I was almost completely covered by shadow.  Lucas rested on his back next to me, probably looking up, probably shocked, probably thinking that Cecile was still in the office and she would kill us both for this: Me glowing and him watching.  I didn’t think before the water held my body, lifted my hair and set me free from the wind, from his eyes and from the dare.

            By the fire I look at Potter for a moment.  The brown of his hair flattened by fire.  It has turned into a light, eggshell brown.  His rough hands throw onto the trembling fire what’s left of the logs we found and chopped among the dense oaks.  The dry heat forms bubbles of sweat above his lip mixed with ash and dirt.  Potter seems to mold the fire in his hands, it dances supported by his legs.  “I used to know how to make fire without matches,” he had said, but after the sun began to go down he gave up.

“Show me some other time, the mosquitoes will come out soon”, and he lit it with a match. 

It is only us.  Where did the world go?  It seemed to have been flushed out with the sun.  Our home is tonight, making fire and disregarding darkness, like every night has been and will be until I have no idea when.  A hot flood of thick anticipation and fear rushes to my head.  It is dark enough to see stars start to coil around the universe, those soul taking, blood sucking mosquitoes hover menacingly around while we swim in a fish tank of light.