December Muses

I.

On the seventh night of Hanukkah, we sat around the table and lit candles to prayers, ate sugar cookies and latkes, and talked about the Maccabees. Flames from the menorahs buckled and swished around the particles of our breaths, bursting yellow; peals of ocher acrylic hissed in tongues without songs, melting and evaporating along with the pirouettes of the dreidel. 

II.

The rain came down like a flora of blunted needles; prickly on the skin, but without pain. And the sound of water splashing against sidewalks, a monotonic sizzle in D flat minor, surrounded me like a curtain.  It seemed, as if, every drop had a bulbous eye shuttered behind lashes, and could follow its trajectory from a market of clouds to the ground of a city where tendrils made of glass embraced the skyline and the distant horizon, where the sun folds into darkness, is a labyrinth of steel.

III.

We spent Saturday evenings in the middle of autumn toasting pistachios and coconut, drinking champagne from crystal flutes, watching bubbles aggregate and disappear on the equators of the bowls, while discussing potpourri, the Allamanda vines and bougainvillea. Silver clouds, the shape of cherries, would wreath the sky and dollops of sunshine would drip down its edges. And the winds would come in irregular gusts, whipping into vortices the dry leaves around trees, yellow, and brown, and charcoal gray, like an avalanche of sparrows, like a dance of dandelions, and fall to the ground in measures of a silence; a rustle, murmur, in those December evenings.  

But those days have passed and people have left, homeless with adventure, mindless with profits, vaccinating, heavily, against an impending orphanage. I miss those moments, of childhood, of togetherness, when we would sit side-by-side, like flowers in a vase, and hold hands, and smile, and listen to the poetry of Wordsworth. And reminisce limericks from the radio show, the tenderness of ink-pots, the excitement of Airmails, and the honeysuckle shrubs on Cypress Hills.

IV.

May be one day, many autumns from now, we will go home again, and sit under clouds, and stare at the moon, sickle in shape against a purple gray sky, and whisper to one another about life, full-circle.

 

A snippet of Ricky's

My mind often floats back to our conversation at Ricky's but is speaking to me this morning in a voice louder than a whisper.
 
You asked, What do you consider your greatest achievement?
 
I paused for moment, took a few sips of my Gin cocktail, rearranged myself on the red cushioned bar stool, and said, The Ivy League, medical school, several publications, getting a job that I'm starting to like, having a decent Savings balance, and a few other things... My voice trailed off to the blare of a Middle Eastern man singing Cry Me A River at the bar's karaoke contest. Somehow saying those things out loud made me suddenly uncomfortable. A flush smudged my temples. I was, as if, reading a checklist, being pompous and self-conceited at the pride in which I considered my past a brocade of achievements. Unease sprouted on the tip of my tongue; I felt motionless, ashamed, show-offy in a way I detested when other people spoke. Humility is a virtue most people have lost, in today's age of showiness, constant prompting of your voice being heard, through easily-accessible media across the entertainment industry.
 
But you smiled, and rubbed your palms and a gentle scent of lavender curled out of your finger tips. You readjusted your cotton scarf, patterned like the wings of a scarlet ladybug, dotted with black and orange highlights, and took another gulp of your Stella Artois. You closed your eyes for a moment, hummed a melody with the new karaoke singer at the podium, and broke into a handsome smirk.
 
And, what about you? What is your biggest achievement? You've probably done a lot to become a manager here, I said, after examining the drawings of cigarette cartons and Patti Smith hanging on the walls.
 
At first you didn't say anything. Smiled, looked at me with an expression of unfamiliarity, pressed the Home button on your phone, the screen lit up telling you what time it was, 10:13 pm, October 10. And then, finally, you said in a low voice, I came out of the Redneck. That has been and always will be my greatest achievement.

Grand Central Terminal

On the Wednesday of the Thanksgiving Weekend, I was waiting in line for a fresh brew of coffee at Tatro's, located on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal, fidgeting with my phone, checking text messages, when the blind man in a plaid shirt nudged my elbow and asked, Where did she go?

I had had a long night with Harry Berman discussing Israeli politics, data meshes, and romance, drinking Petit Chablis, listening to Harry Belafonte and Sam Cooke, and had taken a yellow taxi directly to Grand Central at eight in the morning- which is to say I was exhausted, and groggy, and slightly incoherent from my hangover. We never quite acknowledged the moments when our eyes roved along each others shirts and faces and veins along our forearms, formulating clouds of mild flirtation; the ways our fingers brushed in handshakes, but there are certain emotions we acknowledge through unspoken means. And that night proved to be a multiplicity of those.

Who? I asked.

My wife. She was here a minute ago. Do you see her?

What does she look like?

Brown hair, White, hazel eyes, a long dress, with a cane. Boots, and a purple muffler.

A lady walked up to us. She told me Thanks. Marshal, I'm back -had gone to the restroom. Black hair, green eyes, glossy black skin. With a cane, boots, and a purple muffler.

Let it go, she whispered to me. It's been fourteen years.

 

November

One of my fondest memories from a bus trip across town on a November afternoon on East Sixty Sixth Street is that of a Black man reading poetry to a Black child; his daughter, perhaps, in a pink Taffeta dress, impeccable braids, and long white socks sitting around her knee. The rarity of this occurrence is what, I believe, makes this particular encounter so memorable to me; the digitization of the modern daily has made reading poetry, or reading anything for that matter, in a public receptacle like the toe of a bus, a matter of total antiquity.

Repeat after me, he said to her:

And her hair was a
     folded flower
And the quiet of
    love in her feet.

I recognized this as Yeats, the same poem my grandfather would read to me when cancer was consuming his lungs.