Rider: The Rider Quintet, vol. 1

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3 The heat wave and the high holy days have gone the way of dates marked on the calendar that break time up into bite-sized portions. An empty calendar seems ideal. The tension between the ideal and the real. Between women and men. Parents and children. The murderous mayhem. The women I see on every street say My husband's never home, I'm alone with the children. It's a terrible life. Or, it's a terrible life, my husband's home and I still feel like a single parent with two children. (The noise outside my window has come too near, repairmen on the creaking scaffold, gutteral jabbering, whine of electric saw, ping of ball peen and brusque sound of snow yanked off the air conditioner; diasporian white particles breaking up as they scatter and land on West End where parents walk their kids to the bus, briefcase in one hand, child's warm palm in the other. The oilcloth covered scaffold dangles and swings over the parapets 19 they are trying to repair.) Sitting across from one another on our yukky sofa—probably the last time he set foot in this apartment— he told me he was the first Jewish chaplain in the Pacific Theater. He'd told me before but not with that emphasis, that word order. An air of finality brooded over that final conversation betweenyou and him in the city when he had flown in "to bless the baby." He said he couldn't imagine you living there with that view of "West End Avenue "forever. "In Chicago you had the whole trainyard out your window, and in Salt Lake your eyes could graze the snow-capped mountains year-round, and in Colorado Springs—you remember what my terrace faced there—. "How tawdry the avenue looked at that instant through his eyes! You began to wonder if you'd got everything wrong. But you replied that there was still the chance the moment you walked out the door that something splendid might occur. He mulled over those last words. Half-aloud. Half in prayer. . . . Riding English in Central Park she Bolts out of the tunnel— her expression crossed between danger and delight, her black hat, habit, and jodhpurs stark against the muted gray-white of the bay stallion plunging down the horse path; the trees along the reservoir crouched and whispering amidst the wind-blown cinders and leaf-particles— even if we were planted here together we can still converse; the sun gone off behind the stacks of cirrus, and winds converging, churning up 20 the placid surface, the small waves, like hands steepled in prayer, racing across this concrete basin as if there were a way out or beyond these toy versions of the swells that off the Maine coast lob an outboard back and forth; where sailors, in the instant before they go under glimpse the mundane horror of a wave rearing like a clogged filter . . . ; but even now, as fold on fold of cloud dims the metallic prisms of the chain-link fence I lean against, the bay surges through again, his neck stretched further out than before, as she lets go of the reins and leans far— far forward to grip his mane. He liked that. But his death still left you perplexed as to Why have I come to this hall filled with encyclopedias and dictionaries of the dead when outside small white birds, not gulls, not terns, huddle in the sky, flying close together while they beat their wings, branches thrash in the wind and bent boughs are stark as shadows on a wall behind them, stark and wild and blind, and kids are selling T-shirts with this institution's name, and for a moment, it is not New York but a cordoned off garden with stone and brick to take me back and gold paint peeling off the ceilings. . . . 21 ...