East River, and: Where Are You, Gene Kelly?

East River

If you stand on the shore of the East River, under the broad berth of the FDR,you can just make out, in broken neon on the river's surface,dim letters from bodegas across the avenue:Platanos, Mariscos; red and greenlights from the overpass.

Nothing in the long black sheet of the water to tell you more than the direction it's going.Less than that, even, if it's midnight or later, and you can't read the mapwaves make under tankers and signs,long sidles in the currenta tugboat pushes upstream.

The East River remains as they must have seen it that night:two men—boys, really—half-drunk on whiskeyhalf-drunk on beer—I'll race ya …Here to the other side …

I know what you're thinking. And it wasn't even the trip acrossthat took them. When they reached Brooklyn they foundhigh concrete walls, docks like ladderswith the rungs cut loose,too steep to climb.

Bodies burning with cold, the black thrill of the water like a promiseturned animal now, fear and consciousnesssliding beneath them, the beams of passing shipstouching their wakes asthey vanished—

On a night like this when the air is warm and bridgesmake rainwater patterns out of oil-slicksand burnt feathers, you can walkright down to the river's edge,iron twisting in the water.

It's not even a river. They call it a strait, a piece of the harborthat "abandons its body and finds it again."But there's nothing it would tell youeven if it could. No answersfor the one who survived.

Where Are You, Gene Kelly?

There will come an age when movie starsrefuse to dance. Shocking, I know—openingcredits a lost secret, music a mere underscore.

And you will have become lighterthan a coattail, empty as a black and white shoe,smaller than the swing of a step in your dance.

Some say the show continues even afterthe picture ends, I don't know, but there's a lotthat doesn't get said anymore—each prop

alone without its pair: a cameramissing its reel, the phone without its dial—stranger than bodies separate from their souls.

When you have finished the final numberwe will take each small self you gave usand keep them as nothing has been kept—

not Eisenhower, not the Ford assembly line,not even Fred Astaire. Opening each scene thenwill be like discovering something lost

you always knew best how to remember.See, here you are, it's 1955—all history compressed to a single frame.

How well you've kept the simple: the shuffle,the winning smile. But where are you now, Gene Kelly?The show's still going, and we've forgotten how to dance.