down on my two hands, scrabbling
wordlessly up through vaseline æther --
each flailing finger of my own hands
is a fugitive now, a body glimpsed
darting between brick columns of a portico --
edifice of the shutting down of lands.
Exile — the gloved hand hangs, omnipresent,
thuggish tendrils swelling down to touch
and, paradoxically, pick off detritus --
parasites and soft clinging bits of meat,
dislodging chunks of self, or other --
which? it hardly matters anymore --
threatening every worldly bond and plan.
Amidst this unjust, crushing authority,
how locking eyes relieves the exiled crimp --
how the huge, dull machinery swivels round
to presentness, updating the eye — I am here,
somewhere. . . . . whirring and registering: New York.
Manhattan becomes the human city
within a city, Ren, the middle way,
a demiurge fluttering between earth and sky.
On any given day it will sleeve you
up or down — enlightening or debasing --
Manhattan knows your dignity — and your crime.
In Harlem on a hot summer day
the stores are so worn the hanging food signs
are whited to illegible mirage,
the grey concrete so densely firebombed
with wide splots of flattened, blackened gum;
a post-apocalyptic heat drips from faces
and collars and the very old, bulging,
wilted bodies, tilting against busstands,
as cripples and idiots take the streets,
the air pungent with compressed human waste,
the local bus sticky with thin runnels of piss
ribboning up the center aisle --
but the air-conditioning holds
and the slow, convivial bus ramp
lowers and returns, lifting the hobbled vet
for two blocks, in the bus's relative respite
as if to a lyrical piano flourish,
gentle minor thirds and arpeggios,
another Manhattan park movie day.
So much here continuously changes.
In SoHo, boutique-shops and cafés
proliferate up the cranny streets
like flowing obsidian lava
with names like Mica, Parigot and Baby Grand.
One sees it from the flapping market stalls
docked on weekends like space pod clusters
around that alien outpost, Union Square --
endless, exilic mounds of leafy green:
purslane, mizuna, bok choy and tatsoi,
zebrune, red sucrine, kale, spigarelli,
or up through East 90s' wealth now –
suddenly: no insects, and the air is clear;
poofy girls are walking poofy dogs,
rich frailing ladies tuck into boeuf chardonnay,
pretty pink begonias titter maturely
in curbside playpens romped around a tree --
around every corner new adventure lies.
Manhattan's transit map hangs over all
this fecund matter of a summer's day,
like a guild schematic of a rotting shrimp
with multiple, sinewy intestines. . . . .
Later, the far moon steals a cameo,
one small appearance over Astor Place:
that big yellow smear is a tall streetlight
where the gritty, huffing buses start
their squat neanderthal crawl uptown --
that small white smear above them, that's the moon --
as the stale air fills with fragrant
cloying wisps of laughter after 9 --
dim brick buildings jut at just-strange angles
into the zigzag, wild pedestrian flow