Fast Reflexes

Maybe it was evolutions reward.

My grandparents migrated before the worst.

At the dawn of the 20^th century,

Long before Hitler invaded Poland,

With clever fingers that might

Help a tailor in the New World

He and Rose moved to America,

To never leave Brooklyn.

It was a far more dramatic move than

Jacob’s grandson moved to Hawaii

And a very different future.

He, the grandson, was escaping from New York

That reinforced his need for speed.

He could shoot dice before the city,

Family and a job sealed his future.

He landed 1 AM on February 2, 1965.

Honolulu Airport was quiet, the night sky

Filled with starlight and warm, a welcome feeling.

He drank from a water fountain that offered pineapple juice,

His pace for the next 15 years was slower, much slower.

He thought of his grandfather and how

Jacob’s trip made Hawaii possible.

Here was time for children, a dog, and adventure.

A time to reorder his life’s arc.

Ain't No Sunshine

Surrounded by giants indifferent to sunshine

This metropolis moves to it's own frenetic energy.

Without Central Park, where buildings lean away,

Midtown Manhattan could not breathe.

On a blue-sky day, much like 9/11,

We cross the park under Sol's warming rays.

Just off the poets walk was the old saxophonist,

Putting out sweet sounds of Nat King Cole.

New York has always struggled with its many faces.

It balances between the exclusivity of those who claim ownership

And the 99%, who make for a viable dichotomy,

And create the friction that makes New York a great city.

Turning The Corner

They waited for me.

I missed last year's game

and was delighted to see

it's even better then I remembered.

Turning the corner on Fifth Avenue and 55^th, I smiled.

There was a number M20 bus, unable to clear that corner

because a large furniture truck was trapped at the crosswalk,

because foot traffic blocked its path, because… You get it?

The only discordant note was the lack of horns.

Every year past, on any major cross city street,

you could put money on a post modern ensemble

creating a cacophony of monumentally outraged drivers.

It was incumbent upon me to allow this transgression.

This extraordinary reticence to bellow

at the fates and every other driver.

I accepted the brief lull as a grand welcome to a returning vet.

This is my town.

A place I had hated for 25 years,

But now accept as a neurotic teenager

hell bent on being "king of the hill".

As a senior member, I rejoiced in the warning

offered by the pedestrian I had not run-over 

when he stood, as an obstacle, between me and

my turning that corner: he would “sue my ass”.

Manhattan

Faces on noisy, cluttered streets, bare no memory of 9/11.

That retching moment does not press,

Perhaps a footnote marking the beginning of the insanity.

(The wars will need a Homer like hand.)

Like a swiftly flowing river, eating at its banks,

Enjoining the refuse that  moves with the current,

I step into the morning and its motion.

There is far too much to comprehend.

The street allows all to move,

But offers no mercy to the weak.

No time to assist their passage.

They’re obstacles to be moved aside.

The good people of the city recognize

Someone else’s price to keep the pace.

They believe going to the bar

Does not mean they will drink.

Like a well run asylum, it has rank and distinctions:

It produces art necessitated by the Sirens.

People hide in their private spaces.

Kitty Genovese is not their problem.

The street folks, seek shelter and safety,

In their small desperate world,

That most fear to see.

They are a real inconvenience.

So much art, history, music.

Displays beyond imagining.

Street fairs and markets,

Even silence can be found here.

Finding sun under a pristine blue sky

Requires a sojourn in “The Park”

Where the vertiginous giants give way,

In some small measure, to man.

Beyond Columbus Circle

We enter the miracle of Central Park,

Which offers more than a respite 

From the sound and motion.

The grass, trees, waters,

Watch us, offering dreams.

Benches ask for thought, require we tarry.

A chauffeured merchant prince wears slippers,

Believing they crown him a “renaissance man.”

A museum bookstore sells a book named “Fart”

In the children’s section.  All part of the day.

I love the city, for two weeks a year.

All Hail Columbus

I'll grant you it's clever,

But by the sixth floor

My legs aren't happy,

And Columbus isn't impressed.

Only in New York, in the middle of Columbus Circle,

The home of “fogidaboit”,

Would this loony idea take shape.

A six story walk-up to Columbus's living room.

The statue outdates me,

Although Its pedestal rises five stories

It remains unnoticed by most park visitors, street vendors

And costumed carriage drivers selling horse-drawn rides.

Columbus will remain in his apartment for three weeks.

It is a very upscale location,

Reached by a magic staircase,

With no visible support.

Budgeted Robotics

Her words were well articulated 

And delivered with the speed

Of a 15 second TV commercial;

Unflappable, right when wrong.

I’m not sure what school Budget Rent-A-Car people go through,

But it most include compulsory blood draining,

Along with a lobotomy.

Only my distressed scream could slow her down.

After offering me a discount if I prepaid,

She recited 3 potential additional charges 

That came with a prepayment,

It seemed the discount had disappeared.

She then quoted a price $20 higher

If I took advantage of the prepayment option.

When I declined the “discount”

She recommended a GPS addition at $75 for the night. 

I avoided suggesting a medium priced car

Might cost the same and offer other options.

When I disconnected it was with the suspicion

That the service agent was being retired to her coffin.

Passover

Worth at least two days off from school!

If you happened to live in Brooklyn,

Passover was a time of quiet celebration.

Or, sometimes not so quiet.

If you are a believer, you’re certain that the festival commemorates the Exodus from Egypt,

After the killing of all the first born male Egyptians, people and animals,   

who did not live under 

A blood-stained marked home entrance.

 For me it meant only a sip of wine with a weird dinner,

After a day of Dodger style stickball. 

I no longer play stickball and my childhood indifference to faith

Has hardened into weary skepticism of all things religious.

Saturday we went to our annual Passover Supper.

We used a very abbreviated version of the Passover prayer book (Hagaddah);

This Hagaddah inserts some contemporary thoughts

Into a script that goes back 2000 years.

We, adults and children, 17 strong, sat at the long polished, hardwood, dining table,

And took turns reading, in English, from the prayer book.

Why go? To experience the dubious acceptance of the children

And the passing of the matzos?

I go to measure the changes a year has wrought. 

Leah,  now 16, is  both angry and sad.

Tonight her life looks bleak,

And I’m not fool enough

To impose my poorly-remembered past

Onto her private unhappiness.

Marcia, our hostess these last 15 years, enjoys the annual gathering, the singing,

And 17 voices sharing the reading of the tiny Hagaddah.

I think she will not be unhappy

To pass the hosting to her daughter, Rachel.

Leonard, our host, absorbs the grandchildren’s changing attitudes,

The conversation of friends, and the comfort tradition brings.

As for me, I’m grateful for the annual snapshot.

Once again Elijah did not make an appearance.

Giving Suicide a Bad Name

Abe left a short note.

Asked Phil to handle his “things”.

He couldn't muster the nerve to write “estate”.

He left quietly, left nothing.

Abe had the small office, 

Small enough to pass for a medium -sized closet.

Was that where the bravery came from?

Being reduced to an apology for an office?

Phil, at his desk, reviewing contract papers,

Stopped... looked at the carpet, and thought,

“This is really lousy timing.

Even in death Abe screws up.”

In the room, but outside the tension,

Phil’s partners had little to offer.

Abe had not been part of their process.

They chose to wait Phil out.

Finally, knowing he would sound unfeeling,

Gene closed the invisible coffin.

“Look, Phil, life goes on.

We need to sign the papers”.

I knew Abe’s story.

Dark and empty. No love.

No clients, no money,

Nothing to drink.

Once Upon A Time In The East

New York has lost too many soldiers.

Their names are legend;

Yankee Stadium, Polo Grounds,  Ebbets Field, Shea Stadium.

New ballparks with sponsors names will need our indulgence.

Baseball is what they did before going to work.

Washington to Cincinnati, Boston to St. Louis,

Those were long train trips.

Duke rented an apartment in Brooklyn.

Such a beautiful swing.

Though he’d just as soon draw a walk.

Mays and Mantle made Duke appear less,

But none are his equal on today’s rosters.

After the traditional fall loss to the Yankees

Brooklyn would mourn,

And a couple of people would be shot.

We took the World Series seriously.

The Dodgers’ move to LA,

Was a catastrophe of epic proportions,

At least in Brooklyn, possibly Staten Island.

O’Malley had done the unthinkable.

No close fence for the Dukster,

400 feet to the right field LA Coliseum  wall.

Ebbets Field became apartments,

Imagine the Packers leaving Green Bay.

Highline Park

From the right spot,

(12th Street & Gansevoort works)

There's an historical view of the great city's

Evolution from 1860.

Slave ships and slaughter houses

Coexisted for 150 years before the arches,

30 feet off the ground,

Became home to railroad deliveries

Maybe a clever developer 

Saw a fast buck to be made 

By selling the collapsing unused tracks

To a city hungering for park sites?

Now, while wild greens add to recovered space,

Retailers who can posit name recognition,

Offer cool by understating their presence

With small iconic signs on stores beneath the park.

Surely some higher power 

Must have intervened in preventing 

The last slaughter house from leaving the street below,

It is the veal processing plant that gives the space its authenticity.

I’ll Make Room

Car lengths are crucial.

Any Brooklyn driver, if patient,

Can explain that time is relative,

Especially when visiting a boring aunt.

I learned from my father that

Ours was a tradition of slightly loony,

Getting ahead drivers:

If there was an opening ... go for it!

Sadly, it didn’t stop there.

Being in the passing lane,

When but a few feet from your exit,

Meant executing a fantastically elegant maneuver. 

Of course you could have transferred

Into the turning lane well in advance 

Of your need to,

But that might have cost you eight or nine car lengths.

No self-respecting Brooklyn driver

Would do more than laugh at that choice:

This was the orgasmic moment,

The time you showed your neighborhood proud.

Slowing down to sixty-five in the thirty mile an hour zone,

And seeing the slower traffic in the right hand lane crawling,

With barely inches between vehicles,

It was necessary to carve a tiny space.

Waiting for just the right moment, 

Knowing that the exit lane would

Disappear behind you momentarily,

Now, now it was essential to get your nose in place.

Sure, the car now being forced to brake 

As you claimed occupancy of that exquisite spot

Was going to blast you with horns and curses,

Without which you could not claim victory.

New York Minute

In an escalator going north, she was going south.

It mattered less to her that it was the wrong direction,

As long as it was moving.

 Speed is rule one in New York.

 Coronaries are not helpful,

 But just potential damage

To be borne.

When the sales manager asked

 “Are you really interested in buying?”

 Its clear he has little time to waste.

 Here comes some fool

 Carrying 2 cardboard cups of coffee,

 A Sunday New York Times,

 And a 400 page novel.

He plans to get all this to his hotel.

Oops, his plan failed!

New York Joy

It doesn’t always play that well.

Sometimes the cacophony overwhelms,

And the pace drives you past the brain’s “alert”.

That and the girls in 6 inch platforms, ouch.

The midtown street level

Home to ubiquitous cellphone,

Insistently reaffirms your singularity,

Shouting into a world monumentally indifferent.

There is a morning symphony

Of jack-hammers

Tearing at the flesh of a building

Too small to meet the competition.

Did I mention the poor, the drugs,

Or the garish facade the city presents?

If all the imperfections do not dissuade...

Welcome to New York!

Below the bullshit level runs the subway.

There is no first class seating. 

Here outrages take the form

Of preforming artists and the crippled.

Not many folks race down the train cars,

And the dress code is whatever you’re wearing.

If you’re old and tired, someone may give you their seat.

A $25,000 watch will elicit suspicion or anger.

If you’re brave, conversation is possible:

Smile and ask directions to the Village.

Even money,  you’ll get an answer.

Odds are 2 to 1 the directions will be wrong.

Central Park is as incongruous 

As a chance trip with Alice through the Looking Glass.

The wonder in a young boy’s eyes at his first Yankee game

Fails when compared to the impossibility of the Park.

Strolling the Poets’ Walk

A lone saxophone plays a sexy lament.

Yards away a road, empty of cars,

Serves bikers, runners, dogs and horse-drawn coaches.

Hot-dog vendors, orthodox Jews,

And a contingent of tourists from Lapland,

Observe the acrobatics of a break-dancer,

Who hopes to make $50.00 before his noon audition.

Ball fields, playgrounds, lakes, gardens,

And the trees tell of the seasons

While keeping the surrounding avarice 

Beyond the Park’s borders.

It is in the order of water walking

That both the free Park

And the not so free Subway work.

They’re the best civilization has to offer.

The New Yorkers

Penn State’s Joe Paterno was resigning.

Ray felt Joe had done all that was required.

I felt Joe had not done what he should.

With that the New York boys club lunch ended.

I left certain that had Ray

Been in Paterno’s place,

He would have demanded the University act.

Keeping quiet on the student rape issue would not be Ray’s way.

We, three New York transplants, 

Had covered national politics,

(With Dick representing the right .. sort of)

Our local NFL team, and religion.

No one had ordered dessert,

An act of no small contrition, 

Deciding that since it is was not free

We had better show dietetic restraint.

Leaving our table, each with a posture

That suggested a losing battle with age,

Ray and I headed to our cars,

Dick made his mandatory trip to the john.