Autumn inferred

An energy-saving bulb in lantern,
fish grilling, fat and appealing.
Birds’ indifferent rhapsodic pulses,
pretty and unpretty motions, emotions.

Leaves reluctant to leave
do, innocent of irony or comic
timing, with regrets, with coping.
O oily carbon-scented air!

Pangs fueling pangs.
Wisps of music along conductors.
Essential light, a good large painting, a good
smile, a good eye, good skin, hungry dog.

Roman cinerary urn

A plastic box of grape tomatoes
rests on two apples of a mushy variety
(not the sweet Jonagolds
Jimmy Schuyler loved)
near a large orange, slightly scabby
brandywine, all in a bowl
that looks black but is really
blue with glitter. A small, square
olive-tinted vase holds a
yellow-orange dahlia—cut because
its stem broke—that goes
with the tomato. It’s the plant’s
only flower, crowded as it is
by reseeded cleomes and
miscellaneous weeds. George Foreman’s
“lean, mean (fat reducing) grilling machine”
is dirty from sitting forever on the counter
unused. A card from Finland, a card
from a Greek island, Folegandros,
still stuck to and warping on
the refrigerator, along with the
image of a Roman cinerary urn
clipped years ago from the Times,
turning orange (like the aforementioned
tomato and dahlia). It’s a stone box with
chariot wheels, shields, and helmets
carved in deep relief, that look piled
like Guston’s shoes—another image
of an ancient practice frequently revived.
These personal and intimate belongings
will be buried or incinerated with me,
in piles, in boxes, jars, vases, or bowls,
like tomatoes, windfall apples, nuts, pills.

Shabby genteel

To have thoughts is to mix poorly,
to think is to be both absorbed and transparent
like a pale purple hosta flower that gets fewer looks than weeds.
If one thing illuminates another, it’s either a thought
or a trellis defying an oxidized aluminum sky.

An arrow-shaped bird and a stalled minivan
don’t know how to sit down and think
or walk and think at the same time.
Do I expect to find—descry, I mean—threatening patterns
in flower stalks, overfull pots of impatiens,
dormant moths in cracks?

Incoherent thoughts, warmed by fever,
fill cells of color, energetic
knotted strands in a sketch of a cloud.

Branches stray away from their origins.
Footsteps rush, hang back, strut, stroll, in a modular, intelligible way.
An oval can’t choose to be a circle so is blacked out
with ink that angrily violates outlines.

A staircase with its shadows fills a frame.

Mariposas, cocodrilos.
Una paloma draws in its wings and dives,
flaps to accelerate, averts
a disastrous impact by
folding its neck into its fluffed-up breast,
to stall just as the earth meets it.

Other birds rise ominously in unison.

Because the trees are planted in straight rows
this must be France.
That’s a thought, not a rabbit.

Crickets out of phase—late summer sound.
Asters, leaving behind the forest of anonymity—late summer flower.

Watery, threadbare vision
in one eye, convoluted walls
finishing and distributing sounds.
Complaints oozing like a ripe tomato’s broken skin.

A decoration that goes off in sizzles

It takes three hours to prepare a newspaper.
In three hours a tenement can burn to the ground.
The next performance is in three hours.

In a wet city a block is blazing.
Whirling newspapers flap to the ground.
They ought to prepare for the next performance.

The choreographer and architect are thoughtful.
Their newest thoughts are grounded in ancient thoughts.
Their hair is kept in place with chicken fat.

Dreamland’s whirling bonfire burns
every three hours, then is put out.
The same victims are again miraculously saved.

That’s what they think, that’s what
the newspapers say, that’s what the tenants say.
The fire ought to be put out periodically.

After sizzling, the dance reforms in many layers.
Three hours pass on a miniature block
with a population of German midgets.

The questioning is persistent,
questions running down a little avenue.
All of them should go up in a blazing bonfire.

Then there would be an empty lot on the block.
It’s citizens would be cats.
The midgets make heroic efforts.

Their valor goes unrewarded.
They want to be repatriated to Equatorial
Dreamland, where fat melts in sizzles.

New York is not Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is not Italy.
Italy is not Africa.

The further away they are the less of a flap it makes.
They must prepare to return home.
For the newspapers it’s a performance.

What ought to happen happens.
More thought ought to go into it.
Preparing to perform, he ought to get up.

Robe de chambre

Major League Baseball 4

In the nearly uniform grid of that part of Brooklyn, the intersection of 67th Street and 18th Avenue is a minor anomaly because the street doesn’t go straight across the avenue. It continues west of it at a slight angle a few yards further to the south. Possibly because of that Thomas Wolfe used it in “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” Before 1952 we lived on that deviant block west of the avenue.

One of my mother’s best friends, Miriam, lived in the same apartment building, with her husband, Harry, and their two sons. Miriam, a certified “dame,” smoked and had a cynical, wise-cracking style of talk. Harry was a newspaper reporter. He worked for the Brooklyn Eagle, and later the Daily News. He investigated things, wrote about them, and his stories were printed. He got leads from sources. He seemed to know the city inside out, and he knew all the other reporters. He was sometimes accompanied by a photographer.

Once he was doing a story on juvenile delinquency and decided he needed pictures of delinquent children: children breaking laws, children sneering at their parents’ values, children doing cruel things to each other. So he collected a small group of kids from our block, including me, and took us to an alley in back of our apartment building. We were very young. I may have been eight. I remember being asked to hold a board with a nail sticking out of it over the head of a little girl pretending to shield herself with her arm.

After we moved, I didn’t see Harry or Miriam very often, though my parents kept in touch. Technically, I was still a Yankee fan. Life was good for the Yankees. For the Dodgers, things were never again as good as they were in 1955, though they were still very good. Nineteen-fifty-seven was their last year in Brooklyn. Then they moved to LA.

In the spring of 1957, a few months after the Suez Crisis, an Israeli soccer team toured the United States, probably to help beef up support for Israel. They were scheduled to play an all-star American team in Ebbets Field. According to an item about the game that I found on the web, the Israeli players were asked which famous Americans they’d like to meet. Their reply was, “As athletes, we’d like to meet the Brooklyn Dodgers, as men, Marilyn Monroe.” And so it was arranged that Marilyn would appear and kick off the first ball. As a perk, Harry got extra passes, which he gave to me and my father.

On May 12, 1957, I was in Ebbets Field, probably for the last time. My father and I sat in the press box in the first row of the upper deck along the third base line. I knew nothing about soccer so it’s not surprising that I don’t remember the game, or even if we stayed to see all of it. Sammy Davis Jr. was supposed to appear too, but I don’t remember him either. I do remember Marilyn. She may have been wearing a pink dress. The dress may have had a scoop neck. And she may have worn pink high heels. In any event, she took off one of her shoes, then kicked the ball, which squibbed away crookedly. She seemed pleased. Then she sat on top of the back seat of a convertible and was driven around the field close to the stands. I looked over the railing directly down at her when she passed below our seats.

Long afterward, in 1994, I was in Brooklyn again and walked down 18th Avenue back to 67th Street. I passed an Italian bakery that had been bombed in some ridiculous mob dispute, then the eighteenth-century church with the “tallest flagpole in Brooklyn,” made from an old ship’s mast. Then the site of a house in which George Washington spent a night.

Activity on the avenue became increasingly lively. Then there were crowds. Cars circled blocks filled with cheering passengers. It was a sort of parade with improvised floats in the colors of the Italian flag. At that moment, Italy was playing Brazil in the World Cup final. I took pictures of the animated scene as well as of the apartment building I lived in when I was a child.

I felt like a tourist and thought the same thoughts I would have thought as a tourist in any foreign country, “Why am I here? What am I supposed to be getting out of this? How do I do that?”

In a game scoreless through extra time, Brazil beat Italy 3-2 in a penalty shootout.

(End of “Major League Baseball.")