City Voices and Scenes

Nathan Gold

9/14/01. So, Sollie, here I am again, an old man, zeyde, now. You’re gone ten years, but it’s your birthday and I’m standing here as always on Brooklyn Bridge and staring at that skyline, writing it all down. The longest journey in this country, Uncle Mike would say, stretches from the Lower East Side tothe Upper East, and weekends you would see them there— the rich, the big shots, strolling to the Met, say, or Guggenheim to see the Rembrandts or Chagalls, gold flecks of light drifting down through leafy branches to settle on the shoulders of their tailored silk suits. So I’m halfway: a three-room near the Chelsea, not bad, considering what might have been. Some years ago I ran into Reznikoff at Dubrow’s on Seventh Ave. when he was writing Holocaust, and he blurts out, Eichmann said his entire life was founded onone moral principle: Kant’s categorical imperative, later modified for the “small man’s household use.”My God, can you believe it? Food spewed from his mouth, his hands were shaking. Thousands murdered everyday. He read Kant and yet . . . ! Language rendered useless. Thought turned inside out. Rez wrote his poems true to fact but often with a sense of failure. Three days ago I knew this sense, words failing, as the towers drowned in smoke, as the malach hamoves spread its wings across the city. Rabbi Stern, a good man, a holy man, prayed in its shadow, bewildered as the rest of us. And so, Crane’s poem, Under thy shadow by the piersI waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear . . . but lend a myth to God? No, I don’t think so. The wings are spread too wide this time and stain the river gray the way that Kansas dust storm turned the sky death-gray when we were boys on our trip out west, hitchhiking, all that space, all that American space Crane’s bridge embraced, and not just Brooklyn to Manhattan, but coast to coast, vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, and he should be here now as I am, groping for the words, the true ones, for a country and a city like none anywhere whose streets are shrouded gray (some days, Mike said, near Lublin it came down like snow, like snow), whose skies are ruined with ash.

On the Waterfront

—Know thyself

Flashlight in hand, I stand just inside the door in my starched white shirt, red jacket nailed shut by six gold buttons, and a plastic black bow tie, a sort of smaller movie screen reflecting back the larger one. Is that really you? says Mrs. Pierce, my Latin teacher, as I lead her to her seat between the Neiderlands, our neighbors, and Mickey Breen, who owns the liquor store. Walking back, I see their faces bright and childlike in the mirrored glare of a hard winter New York sky. I know them all, these small-town worried faces, these natives of the known, the real, a highway and brown fields; and New York is a foreign land—the waterfront, unions, priests, the tugboat’s moan—exotic as Siam or Casablanca. I have seen this movie seven times, memorized the lines: Edie, raised by nuns, pleading—praying really— Isn’t everyone a part of everybody else? and Terry, angry, stunned with guilt, Quit worryingabout the truth. Worry about yourself, while I, in this one-movie Kansas town where everyone is a part of everybody else, am waiting darkly for a self to worry over, a name, a place, New York, on 52nd Street between the Five Spot and Jimmy Ryan’s where bebop and blue neon lights would fill my room, and I would wear a porkpie hat and play tenor saxophone like Lester Young, but now, however, I am lost, and Edie, too, and Charlie, Father Barry, Pop, even Terry because he worried more about the truth than he did about himself, and I scan the little mounds of bodies now lost even to themselves as the movie rushes...