.

B I G C I T Y S U M M E R 49


A young boy in torn and faded jeans
A worn baseball cap aslant his brownish locks

Walked the streets
Humid-hot with summer’s heat.

Vacation in East Midtown Manhattan
Was long
And vacant
For ten-year-old boys in those days,
Games and amusements limited to--

Museum of Natural History in Central Park
A haven for eternal Indians and
towering Dinosaurs And for
wandering
wondering minds.

Playing throw-and-catch
With pink “High-Bouncer”
Spalding rubber ball
Against smooth, sand-blasted facades
Of elegant apartment houses
Where uniformed doormen,
Officiously,
Chased
LITTLE BOYS--

A W A Y B A C K

Into their brownstone houses
To color in books and
Carve models in soft balsa wood.







G O I N G T O T H E S U N 50



Mountains grow
As the car curves around each bend
And the shoulder falls away
To shifting silver-grey
Shines off Lake McDonald far below.

Sun fades, winking inside
Grey-white clouds
And cool rains sprinkle the windshield.

Lightening forks flash
In distant thunder-thuds
As Sibelius’s SECOND sounds
By chance or
By design.

Light crashes--

And it climbs and climbs

Towards the summit

But detours near the peak--

Stalled and stopped.







M E M O I R E S 51



“Ou sont les neiges d’hier?”


“Dans les plaisirs d’aujourd’hui.”


“Mais quest-ce que c’est laisse ici?”


“Les bons gouts d’hiver.”







T H A L Y S 52



This high-speed, streaming

French super-train

Flies by in rushing window frames--


STICKS

of looming dying trees

Left quaking up

On white and brown-patched

HILLS

stretching
rolling
down
in
lichened carpets

G R E E N

Between iron-flowing streams--


Flashing on the inside screens

Of my focused mind.







J A N I S I N J O Y 53



A live wire
Arcing high-voltage sparks
Ribbons into rainbows
Of revolt, regret, fear.
Jumping in ranges
High and long,
Rarely heard before or since--
Silenced by a silver needle’s fatal song.


A misfit in garlands
Out of Texas’ blue-jeaned dust
Into a spotlight’s star-shined glare--
An exploding red giant too bright to burn,
Too dangerously loud to lay to rest.


She shrieked her gin-soaked rants
Across scales etched
In tracks of pain,
Marking spots in loss of life’s blood--
Spilled along mileposts of fame.


A flower, a boa, a bottle of booze--
Born to sing,
Born to lose.







T H E I S L A N D 54



EARTH contaminated itself into

A conditioned biosphere

Where all life heretofore

Went on--disturbed.



They ran out

Into the feeling world ;

Were caught,

Brought back to--
the SHADOW LAND.


The film flickered out,
And so did I.







V I S I T A T I O N S 55



My old ghosts gleam and glimmer on
The dry walls of my brain
Draining its dying sparks
Across gaps that
Ignite with memories
Of moments held in check--

Ones vindicated,
Ones banished.


Only to return
Uninvited,
Ineluctably, unintelligibly
Save for tiny blips
On the radar of my mind.







H E A R E R S 56



An audience of three lost souls

Gathered to hear him speak:

His words spun forth

Astounding sounds

Into their ears,

His phrases scattered rays

And his pauses--hung fire.


He emptied his mouth and,

Drained of magical spirits,

Spent and exhausted,

He left the table

To sip at the springs of life--


A light draft at his local bar,

Next door.








T H E S A C 57



We all gathered in the SAC,
Played at flipping trading cards
To build our collections of famed Yankees

And learned our Latin responses
By pure rote-sounded memory :

“Introbio ad altere Dei”

(Or something like that
For that was as far as I ever got).

We learned more about the streets
In this, our refuge from the streets,
Than in all our Catechism lessons
Injected by stern-faced nuns.


The sacristy was our home away from home--

Where the Lord rented rooms.






C A L L I O P E 58



Inside his sounding mind

There lived a chiming machine

Of multi-faceted notes

A colorful muse

Of smoothest euphonies

Of clanging cacophonies

Conjuring up tones

Of eliding shapes and hues

Up and down on scales

Of sliding bells and rings

All colliding

Clicking into slots

Creating in his world--


Unheard music.






A V I E W F R O M A B A L C O N Y 59



In the black night sky

Planes alight with white

And red-tail lights blinking to

Push by smoothly, steadily


As beneath


Upon the near distant

Parking lot

Empty but for

One long, white stretch-limousine--

Also white and red tail-lighted--

Rolls its way across the black

Asphalted tarmack of its

Earth-bound corridor--


And sparks the lonely landscape

That reflects my singular mind.






FRAGMENTED PHRASES 60


Obscure outlines

Follow into patterns

Positioned into

Juxtapositions of

Paradoxical propositions


U N T I L--


Words alone will have happened


I N T O P O E M S--



If they do.








R E D I C E 61


Stare into the sun.

Then, close your eyes

Real tight--and behold :


Bright jagged-edged red cubes

Or green holes with blue dots

Crystallize in your inner eye

Before yellowing hues

Appear to divide squares

Into honey-combed hives

Waxed with luminous lines

To settle into

Black-circled pulsations

Pixalating on your retinal

Curves without cessation.


I rise and walk in--

Out of the sun.








MR. KROOK 62



A foul-looking
foul-smelling
foul-mouthed

HUSK of a man

Imbibed in spirits
To the flash-point
Of spontaneous combustion.

He lets rooms
To lost souls
With pasts to forget
And presents to hide
Cloaked in mysteries and living hells.

A growling
barking
slurring
V O I C E
Of a gravelly throated villain
Parched for his next bibulous bout.

Who upon his last breath
Discovered that he COULD
Actually read his cryptic
Treasured-letters--

Before he went up in smoke
In old London Town.







B I G S I R 63


Sea meets cliff
In waves of blue-greened and
spindrifted foam,

As I careen around each treacherous turn

Rocks fracture and carve
Into bent and broken fragments
For birds and seals and otters--

And beleagured drivers--

To light upon in refuge from
The relentless rhythms of the
Sea-escape below.


And circling, far above,
In spins and whorls
One “hurt hawk”
With wounded wing
Drifts on wind, rises and falls,
Cries out in mawkish notes--

“Oh, sir, big, big sir,
Won’t you come and glide with me
For awhile--

Before we each decide
To death-spiral
Into the amoral arms
Of the grave sea below?”







S A F E 64A


Underground in a sealed-off room

The young man wrote--

Without sound, without disturbance,

With only enough light and air

To sustain thoughts

Spun out of himself

Like a patient spider’s silken thread

That coalesced

To form a web of words

To hold a novel’s thread--

And a captured thought--

From the fires

That flamed below him

Igniting scenes of

Desperate characters burnished into

Hidden lines of haunting memory.

64B



For a time

He felt safe

Behind his vaulted door--

Inside his safe-like room.






B R A K E M A N I N S T E A M 65


Billowy white puffs of large hot steam
Clear to reveal--
a FIGURE
Looming, spread-legged on gray-white tiles
Hunched over, he sits--squat, silent, sweating:

A boulder of a black man outlines himself--
Big, bald-headed,
Spilling flesh and muscle in floppy folds
Over six feet of gristle and bone
With stomach swelling over thunder thighs

H E S I T S

Wiping his slick dome
With fat, swollen knuckled-hands.

The steam room at the local YMCA
Holds this angry giant
Ex-brakeman
Late of the UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD
For twenty-seven years
Now disabled
after a fall one windy night
from a wobbly, fault-welded
train-car ladder:

“When train rolls ‘round the curve
Canna’ tell whas a-movin’--
Train on rails, ladda’ or you.”

He whistles through tight teeth and
Sheets of hot white steam.






LONG ISLAND RAILROAD 66A



From NEW YORK CITY streets
Sleet-wet and black ash-faulted,
I mix my way through pushing throngs
To find PENN STATION; then
Down, descending moving-stairs
That funnel-out onto running platforms
Compressed with crushing crowds
Who separate out--
Like the silver spheres
In pinball machines
That find their ways
Past bumper-guards and
Pulsating toadstools of flashing lights
To fall into their proper exit gates:
These garlands of holiday and silver-belled travellers
Slide down multi-channeled tracks
To their waiting, breathing trains below.


Trains in darkened halls of
Labyrinthian lines of
Straight, curved and switching
Series of iron-rails that
Ease forth each set of
Coupled cars until they
Squeeze out like snakes from
Their shriveled, shed tunnel-skins
To find their singular routes
Rushing due E A S T--
due to arrive at their
duely appointed times.

Gliding past refracted 66B
Scenes of freshly frosted snows,
Snows in puffing swirls
Of sunlit flakes,
Blowing, blinding with
Sparkling speed as
Our iron-horse
Gallups along this L O N G
Long Island Railroad route
Elongated steadily, making its way
Toward that Island’s tip,
Past Islip to Montauk Point
At land’s end
Where sounding sea meets
Long Island’s singing SOUND.

We S T O P; and S T A R T again--
On rails reverberating repeated syllables
Of spinning wheels, bearing
Steel on steel
As slick and smooth as
Click-clack clicking ice
Cicling over singing slippery slopes
On rolling leveled land.

On either side of shifting train-car
Slanting through sun-blinding
Shafts of silver-slivered light and
Beaded drops on dripping wild glass--
I see the sea
Stretching dark-blue plains
Etched-off at the horizon line
Where light-blue lighted sky
Meets and blends
With motion and with time--
S T O P P E D.







S I R E N S 67A


I sit
Chained at my desk
Lit by halogen halos
And watch
Through slanted slats
My window view
Of old-man lamp posts,
Foregrounding spotted lights,
Roll back into backgrounds of black.

When,
In Doppler distance
The sirens’
Silvered voices
Pulsing closer, closer,
Sing seductively.

Their haunting sounds
Focus into streaks
Red-flashing
Going by my window
Receding into shrinking bleats:
OUT.

I then return to pitched-black, silent
Echoes off the
Inner linings of my mind:

QUIET NOW--
Except for bumping rubber-tired tones
Cruising headlamps
Along the empty
Still streets below.
67B



Now, the danger past,
I relent, relax
Undo my bindings
Raise up my blinds.

Yet still
I hear the piercing music
As the sirens now sing softly--
In the fissures of my mind.






R O O M 68



Sliding panels of reconstructed sections

Fall into place

As more structures are ripped up and open

Leaving exposed areas of pipes and wires

Gaping and dangling

Caked with crumbling debris

Of plaster and paint.



My room is being rebuilt

From the inside out

As my mind struggles

To reattach its dangling ganglia

That also gap and snap

Between the spaces

Where the sparks catch hold.


My mind’s space needs a new addition.






END OF PART IV