The Horses: New & Selected Poems

Coming Back

184 coming bAck There had crouched trying to name it now a complex shaggy beast whose spine was Broadway or the subway glowing beneath jumble city and that afternoon in the still August sun more than forty years later I felt it rise shamble off I was looking out across the Hudson where my father had lifted me up over the railing to sun dazzle ships on the river The belly of space The Jersey shore ranked thick with new buildings and our old neighborhood for long gone rich men at the other end of the century plazas curving drives had become Dominican Broadway shrunken telephoto march of black and brown shoppers shimmering bodegas Time is a belly too I had left my mother’s small Queens apartment where time was eating us alive to what? touch back to my childhood? rescue myself in that dragonscape? Sat on our stoop tranced in the doubleness 185 past present strolled to the top of the street where the thighs of the buildings met packed groin of overpass railroad pedestrian bridge Larry and I had hooted through its echo tunnel muggy summer days like this to our dead dog bottle and condom adventures on the river So new kept up! not crumbled or demolished this fenced oval park and plaza where I’d skated where the older boys played roller hockey And still I only realize the stillness now Where were the kids? Hardly a soul on the street a few gazers couples on Riverside Drive Who lived in these apartments now off the Spanish Broadway hustle in these massive fortresslike buildings with their sunglittered windows? She was the only one I saw queen bee of the solitude a beautiful young Latina 186 reading on the stairs in an entrance court dark curly brown hair full fruity mouth Soundboothed in a frown of concentration she held the book close to her face Not a flicker my way She read me out I wanted to approach her to enter her kept air I wanted I began to burn But what would she have seen? An ecstatic balding older man in a striped tee shirt And what would I have said I was a kid here half a century ago and I want to make love to you? Still on my circuit back off the river I glanced in at her ogled hopelessly and went on counting the places heroics terrors A car rolled by only other sign of life sitting low on its shocks blaring salsa music Washington Heights I had read became the center of Dominican crack trade 187 So did the dealers live here posh lower Heights in these silent carefully tended buildings? my lovely Latina some drug lord’s mistress? And as I turned the corner of our old block it hit me Goneness as if a starfish had everted its stomach sucked the streets and houses to a clean stone socket Ghost of goneness toiling up the block in that heat the familiar yellow building floated in the notch at the top tilted across Broadway at the angle of ascent It had been a savings bank those years ago out our living room window Like toiling up the birth canal Time the laundry scent rising off my dead father’s shirt a mango-mouthed woman jalopy rolling on Latin music When I sat back down on the stoop 600 West 157th Street it was like a museum or a stage set drug rehab where the cleaner’s used to be two black jivers laugh-calling to a third 188 I’d sat here in leaden terror waiting to fight Sanford I’d watched that little man totter the pavement fall smashed glasses blood orbits there across the street in front of the kindergarten Not then but now my mother’s eyes spread vast across the windows eyes of a sharper deeper leaving Went out front sat in the pigeon park in the power stream Black working men on the benches where my Granma had sunned flirted with her elderly suitors this triangular concrete park like a breakwater against the Broadway traffic our apartment house smiling behind on its sheltered curving street Counted up fifth floor Those were our windows That’s where we lived When I looked back down my gaze locked with a handsome fortyish...