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By the East River of Manhattan Island Where once the Iroquois canoed in style— A clear liquid caressing another name for rock, Now the jumping Stretch of Avenue D housing projects Where Ricans and Afros Johnny Pacheco / Wilson Pickett The portable radio night— Across the Domino sugar Neon lights of the Brooklyn shore Window carnival of megalopolis lights From Houston Street Twenty kids take off On summer bikes Across the Williamsburg Bridge Their hair flying With bodega bean protein Below the working class jumping like frogs— Parrots with new raincoats swinging canes of bamboo Like third legs Down diddy-bop 6th Street of the roaring Dragons Strollers of cool flow When winter comes they fly In capes down Delancey Past the bites of pastrami Sandwiches in Katz’s Marching through red bricks aglow dragging hind leg Swinging arms Defying in simalcas Hebrew prayers inside metallic containers Rolled into walls Tenement relic Roofs of pigeon airports Horse-driven carts arrive with the morning Slicing through the venetian blinds Along with a Polish English Barking peaches and melons Later the ice man a-cometh Selling his hard water cut into blocks The afternoon a metallic slide intercourses buildings which start to swallow coals down their basement Mouths. Where did the mountains go The immigrants ask The place where houses and objects went back Into history which guided Them into nature Entering the roots of plants The molasses of fruit To become eternal again, Now the plaster of Paris Are the ears of the walls The first utterances in Spanish Recall what was left behind. People kept arriving as the cane fields dried Flying bushes from another planet Which had a pineapple for a moon Vegetables and tree bark popping out of luggage The singers of lament into the soul of Jacob Riis Where the prayers Santa Maria Through remaining fibers of the Torah Eldridge Street lelolai A Spanish never before seen Inside gypsies. Once Cordova the cabala Haberdasheries of Orchard Street Hecklers riddling bargains Like in gone bazaars of Some Warsaw ghetto. Upward into the economy Migration continues— Out of the workers’ quarters Pieces of accents On the ascending escalator. The red Avenue B bus disappearing down the Needle holes of the garment factories— The drain of a city The final sewers Where the waste became antique The icy winds Of the river’s edge Stinging lower Broadway As hot dogs Sauerkraut and all Gush down the pipes of Canal After Forsyth Park is the beginning of Italy Florence inside Mott Street windows— Palermo eyes of Angie Flipping the big hole of a 45 record The Duprees dusting Like white sugar onto Fluffed dough— Crisscrossing The fire escapes To arrive at Lourdes’ railroad flat With knishes she threw next to Red beans. Broome Street Hasidics with Martian fur hats With those ultimatum brims Puerto Ricans supporting pra-pras Atop faces with features Thrown out of some bag Of universal race stew— Mississippi rural slang With Avenue D park view All in exile from broken Souths The horses the cows the chickens The daisies of the rural road All past tense in the urbanity that remembers The pace of mountains The moods of the fields. From the guayaba bushels outside of a town With an Arowak name I hear the flute shells With the I that saw Andalusian boats Wash up on the beach To distribute Moorish eyes. The Lower East Side was faster than the speed Of light A tornado of bricks and fire escapes In which you had to grab on to something or take Off with the wayward winds— The proletariat stoop voices Took off like Spauldine rubber balls Hit by blue broomsticks on 12th Street— Wintertime summertime Seasons of hallways and roofs Between pachanga and doo-wop A generation left The screaming streets of passage Gone from the temporary station of desire and disaster I knew Anthony’s and Carmen Butchy Little Man Eddie Andrew Tiny Pichon Vigo Wandy Juanito Where are they? The windows sucked them up The pavement had mouths that ate them Urban vanishment Illusion I too Henry Roth “Call It Sleep.”
The Empire State Building Is on 63rd Street Ramon wanted to bet Manolo Manolo said impossible The Empire State Building Is on 72nd Street They made a ten dollar bet And borrowed Cheo's car And headed towards Brooklin When they came back Late that night All that Manolo wanted to know Was If Gloria cooked
In a city that now floats in a bottle, In a dimension outside of the census, within walls that were unregistered, there was a painter, Who performed his roll like the Taino cave etchers, the pyramid illustrators of Mexico, the scribblers of hieroglyphs. Vigo painted the hallways of the tenements, While through the air he flew upon a white horse, Or smoked hashish for his desert camel through Moroccan tubes. He painted rocks which were heavy art. Loose bricks were found by landlords containing Antillean pictographs. An artisan of the streets, whose smooth knowledge of many angles Made more lines visible through the old face of the barrio. Against colorful bodega windows, bright candy stores, the epoch of the pachanga Deep in the clubs of night under the world In the submetropolis of need, against walls merely holding up. Once we spoke of the art of survival, of loose lions and hungry tigers, He painted lizard instincts along imaginary river bamboo, Frozen eye sockets containing tar and northern ice. We recognized how we were packed in the chance of numbers, ciphers in the wintry spread, noses popping out of sardine cans, We spoke against the doo-wop of The Paragons Meet the Jesters Till dawn brought a blue light upon roofs—the city skyline bricks steel edges jagged in the wind. In a conference of the stoops he maintained that Dulces Labios Mayaguez was his origin, he spoke of sweet mangoes, plena pulp, Touching trees in honor of the Tainos of his hands stationed deep in his bark, with his left hand where a tattooed cherry blossomed. Vigo made a collaboration between survival and creativity, He stored objects that came with the wind, Had a cellar full of broken gadgets portions that could insert into any malfunction, A bazaar in search of a dictionary of shapes and proportion. He brushed himself like freezer ice Halka brilliantine shine, never alone always with a prehistoric beast. As evidence that I was there on this other planet I still maintain a rock which he painted against the laws of gravity Now a paperweight grounding the poetry of the tropics Against the flight of the east trade winds.
for Joe Bataan
1
some waves
a wave of now
a trombone speaking to you
a piano is trying to break a molecule
is trying to lift the stage into orbit
around the red spotlights
a shadow
the shadows of dancers
dancers they are dancing falling
out that space made for dancing
they should dance
on the tables they should
dance inside of their drinks
they should dance on the
ceiling they should dance/dance
thru universes
leaning-moving
we are traveling
where are we going
if we only knew
with this rhythm with
this banging with fire
with this all this O
my god i wonder where are
we going
sink into a room full of laughter
full of happiness full of life
those dancers
the dancers
are clapping their hands
stomping their feet
hold back them tears
all those sentimental stories
cooked uptown if you can hold it for after
we are going
away-away-away
beyond these wooden tables
beyond these red lights
beyond these rugs & paper
walls beyond way past
i mean way past them clouds
over the buildings over the
rivers over towns over cities
like on rails but faster like
a train but smoother
away past stars
bursting with drums.
2
a sudden misunderstanding
a cloud
full of grayness
a body thru a store window
a hand reaching
into the back
pocket
a scream
a piano is talking to you
thru all this
why don't you answer it.