Güd wrtr

With my poet friend en route
to her reading on Long Island
into the bowels of the renovated
edifice looking nothing like
the original Penn Station with
its 84 soaring Doric columns, its
concourse covered by magnificent
glass domes, an architectural
marvel demolished six decades
ago, more recently slingshot’d
into the 21st century, fresh
glass and steel gleaming

Even as we escalator down
to below-ground tracks with
some of the 600,000 other souls
who daily pass through,
we conjure the long-gone
click-clack, the sway of
shifting cars as we tunnel
from one island to another

Emerge into a gray day
that matches the back ends
of brick buildings grayed with
centuries of time and grime
as we skim nearly soundless
through boneyards of rail refuse
past tall brick rectangles with
people we’ll never know living
shoeboxed inside

Giving way to greenery
and wider streets lined
with houses and sidewalks
and driveways with good-
looking vehicles

Watch the Gap

advises the edge of the train
car as we exit, as we enter
the small village, all of 3.4 square
miles of homey-ness, photogenic
houses, tidy lawns, sidewalks
begging for kids on bikes

not so many miles down
the track but oh, so many
lifelines, so many lifetimes
widening the gap from
then to now, of traveling,
somehow, from there to here

I’ve long admired street poets who set up a table with pens and paper (sometimes a typewriter) on a sidewalk or other outdoor space and write an on-the-spot poem for people passing by.

On this trip to New York I’m traveling with my poet friend Mary Mackey as she does two readings for her most recent book, “Creativity: Where Poems Begin.” Mary and I walked the High Line—a 1.45-mile-long elevated park created on a former New York Central Railroad spur—where we encountered a poet who set up shop on the High Line offering her craft. We engaged her to write a poem about us and gave her the first line, which is also the title.

So instead of one of my poems today, I’m offering you one by this young poet, Benedith Laure Loiseau, whom two older lady poets met and asked for a poem. (As longtime unpaid poets, we know how lovely it is to have someone pay you, so we gave her $20… the top of her rate scale.) We quite like Benedith’s poem, too!

•••

Two poets in New York

Benedith Laure Loiseau

•••

Two poets in New York
running the streets
as if they lived here,
embracing the torrents
of the city.

The rhythm of madness
murmurs underneath your feet:
Each moment is a wonder;
each glance is a scene.
Right there on the highline
all the artists are thriving

There is an elegance,
a grace,
a dance worth noticing.
Make a misstep here,
and you may lose your footing.

Luckily, we have each other
and the gift that keeps on giving.
Luckily, we have the gift that keeps on.

(In memory of the Stonewall Uprising, June 28, 1969)

The tiny triangle of a park
catches my eye as the yellow taxi
whisks me back to where I began—
three days in, and I’m taxiing like
a New Yorker.

The fluttering rainbows make
me want to search out the wee
green space with the tall statue.
Fingering my portable encylopedia,
I oh! right there in the cab—

Stonewall. That Stonewall.
Not the Civil War general, but
the site of a different kind
of battle, now a national
monument to those who
fought, who died in a war,
I realize, that has never
ended.

And I think of the men
who lived the last of their
lives in small bedrooms
in San Francisco, dying of
a plague no one could
quell at the time,

tended by women I knew,
visited by men in high heels,
who brought food and held
the hands of their friends
and lovers as they died,
so many shunned by their
embarrassed families.

And I walk to the park,
where the rainbow flags stir
in the soft breeze, taking a place
at the wrought iron fence with
other pilgrims on a gloriously
sunny New York afternoon,
and remember,

before turning to look at the bar
where so many made a stand
for their right to exist.

And I cross the street,
open the fabled door,
and go in.

Spray painted on the back of signs
indicating construction on
Waverly Place, down the block
from Washington Square Park,

Say “I love you,”

where yesterday a host of humanity
carried other kinds of signs
protesting unfairness, brutality
in a far-away place.

This morning Mary and I walk
past visible despair on park
benches, men and women farther
down than “down and out” conveys.

Amid tourists taking selfies
in the park (even us oldies
but goodies), as NYU students
hurry to and from their last

classes of the year, say goodbye
to a professor, I think about
the blue pouches with rescue
drugs given to us
on the street by kind souls

hoping to help folks like those
on the bench, or the ones
slumped in subway entrances
and doorways without doormen

like the ones who kindly open
the brass-and-glass doors
to us every time we return
to the hotel.

And I read aloud, Say “I love you,”
as I pass the signs, think it
as passers-by pass by,
to the man who makes

my poke bowl for take-away
lunch, whisper it as I walk
behind the benches ribboning
the park,

Say “I love you,”

to—as a kind man once said—
the least these, my brethren,
my brothers and sisters,
weeping with those who weep.

(for Georgann)

Yeah, I retired that license plate
when I donated the car to the public
radio station some years back,

and Dick removed the plates
for me because I wasn’t letting
those go, seeing as how

you claimed them as your first
published piece of writing,
coming up with the phrase,

as you did, on the spot at
the State Fair one broiling
August day at the DMV booth.

You paid for them, too—
your birthday present, you said—
though I protested,

I can’t put those on my car.
People will think I’m bragging.
And you, mischievous light

in your eyes, popped back:
Not spelled like that.
Because, of course, it had

to fit in seven letters. Dick
added the umlaut over the ü
to fancify it. For years

my students knew that
I was on campus when they
saw my car. And today

the roses are blooming their
fool heads off on the plate
affixed to the backyard

fence—both of them full
of fragrant remembrance
of you.

Because I’d never seen one before,
never unpeeled the thin-skinned bulb
and pried out a half moon of garlic,

I had no idea what the fit-in-your-hand
contraption was. But it came with him
and the creaky red overstuffed rocker

that had belonged to his father, along
with a formerly red Chevy Luv pickup
the color of a not-yet-ripe tomato.

“A garlic press,” he said, and when I
looked perplexed, he added, “to mince
garlic?” the question hanging between

us like so many unspoken. “You’re so
smart—but you don’t know…?”
I came by my ignorance honestly.

“No one squished garlic in my house,”
I said, not coming from a family of
cooks. Or Italians. We didn’t eat rice

either, which he taught me to cook,
mostly brown or wild, those being
his favorites. And now when I make

soup, I pull his press from the drawer,
knowing he’s hovering nearby with
that teasing grin—”you don’t know…?”

The can-do fellow who married me,
who has never left, ghosting the kitchen,
the one I inhale in every fragrant bulb

I press into tiny bits.

(for SML)

My horoscope for the week
advised: Be on the lookout for
meaningful coincidences.

Synchronicities are coming!
You have entered the More-Than-
Mere-Coincidence Zone.

Or, as my late friend Julie
liked to say, Honey, there
are no accidents.

So it was that, driving up
the hill to see you, I thought
how perfect—a fish cloud

swimming across the bright
blue sky—pointing the way
to you, my tropical fishy

best friend, who dissected
more than one departed fish
from your tank to study

under your kid’s microscope—
still and always the best person
to bring to a tidepool. So I snap

a photo of this cumulus fractus
fish out of water disguised as
a torn piece of cotton candy.

Because you and fish, whether
star- or all manner of marine life,
go together like you and me,

not mere coincidence, definitely
a meant-to-be, related to each
other as forever friends are

in all the best possible ways.

Leave everything undefined, including yourself. Befriend uncertainty.
Fall in love with mystery. Kneel at the altar of Not Knowing.
Give your questions time to breathe, and the answers will find you.

— Jeff Foster

•••

Without form, you float with loss
in that space between here and gone,

your cries lifting like fog, seeking
answers to the unanswerable. The you

who once was has morphed into one
who looks like you and sounds like you

but who is utterly transformed, your
molecules blasted out of a cannon,

resettling into an unrecognizable form.
This is no accident. This is the cost of living

in a body with an expiration date unknown
to the one in that body—and to the ones

who loved the one in that body. You, awash
in grief, fear drowning, but look—

you’re floating, face upturned to sky,
breath like clouds coming and going—

going and coming—uncertain, unknowing,
but here. You. Here.

You and your wide open, tender heart.

Early evening patter on the roof
morphs into an insistent shower

—what ho? rain?
—yes, rain now—

followed by equally emphatic sun
blazing in the west, illuminating

the wall of cranky clouds that has
moved on, heading east, as am I

in the car, when, holy cow, RAINBOW!
curves its full-spectrum self over

the pines arrowing into the charcoal
sky. The cloudburst of the word bursts

from me—RAINBOW!—not as if
we never see them here, but rarely

so vivid, and with every curve and turn
it pops up again, and I’m announcing

—RAINBOW!—

though there is no one listening,
except for maybe the red-headed angel

who long ago told me that she hoped
to work in rainbows once she made

it to heaven, and I have no doubt
that she did, so perhaps my enthusiasm

nudges the immortal lighting show
team as I beg for an encore

—Hana hou! Again! More!
Keep rainbowing on!—

applauding at the long stoplight,
its red no match for this moment’s sky,

unable to look away from
the glorious arcing prism,

never wanting to see it fade.

Because it seems that cold weather
might finally be done with us,

because spring is springing with
its always surprising abandon,

tossing frilly blooms around like
so many enthusiastic pom-poms,

I decide that the plants that have
sheltered all winter on the front porch

can move to the sunny backyard
deck. And so the moving begins—

first lugging down the driveway
the tall, leggy ficus that a long-ago

editor gave me when I succeeded
her in the job, then the smaller ficus

that was ailing when I brought
it home, its adoring person near

the end of her life. Then the round
container of succulents, some

a soft, sagey green, some darker
and spiky. And the hydrangea

that the sun roasted has popped
back, so I will find it a shady spot—

trickier now with the old sycamore
pruned and some volunteers

in the urban jungle making an exit.
I move pot after pot as the cats sit

and watch, just out of the way
but interested in the process.

And when I’m done, Diego jumps
up next to a heart-shaped terra cotta

planter of last year’s stragglers into
which I will plant new annuals.

Johnny Jump-ups, I think, little
grinning violas in yellow and purple,

as well as others that catch the eye
of this give-it-a-try gardener—

still not very savvy after many years
but delighted by what shows up,

regrows and flourishes, with so
very little help from me.