Lost Details

I.

Your mustache looked
like the silhouette of an umbrella
sprawled over your lips -
the color of midnight,
the texture of grass;
leaving a line down your philtrum
a gap
through which tears can race
sing ballads and praise, 
and vanish
without a trace.

II.

Janice Rodriguez -
I saw you, yesterday,
Staring at a cabbage.
Mumbling a telephone number
Tied to your braids;
Your hair as thick as the Bible.
Your eyes, so large
and round,
You could fit into them
a zoo,
an elm,
a library of candles,
and Saturn.

III.

While reading a stanza
from Goethe's Prometheus,
I looked up
and noticed
on the bowl of the spoon,
an inverted image of the world outside.
Clouds floating.
The sky in labor.

I picked it up,
and gave a lick,
tasting clouds,
water,
and in turn,
a corner of the Universe.

IV.

Helen,
Do you think peacocks
or butterflies
wonder about their destinies?
Do lilies cry?
Do cherry blossoms make love?
Do finches discriminate
against the colors of their beaks?

V.

My name
is Tony Roy -
A biracial fruit
of a Spanish mother and an Indian father,
with skin
the color of burnt sulfur.

What I do
a majority of my evenings
is listen to the limericks
of your Polaroid shutters,
count my breaths,
play piano to the rain,
and applaud.
 

Winter Storm Jonas

Wake up, Odalis, wake up -

They're here, the snow flakes
in clusters, like unstemmed
cauliflower florets,
knocking on your window pane.

They wear invisible crowns of mist,
that crystallize from water drops
the size of grapes or honeydews,
into symmetric arrangements of needles -
A plethora of shapes, some
reproducible in paper cutouts, and some
more uniquely creative; the result of
physical forces like pressure and wind velocities,
that flatten molecules
and press hydro-oxygen atoms
into geometries that create magic,
that sparkle like beads of mica,
that glimmer like iridescent sequins,
that shiver in its lattices,
and vibrate like abacus balls.

Your visitors are
a pale monochrome, white as milk,
created by absorbing the very colors
that distinguish Autumn from Apartheid,
that distinguish malaise from Minetta prints.

They float and swirl
through topographies and ecosystems
across regions, where birds
are flightless,
and Spring is a prehistoric footprint,
and settle on the tarmac of the road
in front of your door,
where ambulances are engaged
in skirmishes between the living and the dead,
flashing lights that glow
a raspberry red and aquamarine.
Someone today will die, and
someone will birth,
and the circle of life will continue
in the way calendars are marked;
a cyclic process that never ends -
Not until you and I become fodder
for the Bougainvillea vines and forget-me-nots
in the forest by the hills.

Your visitors have grown
to hundreds of billions, and
are clones with identical names, Jonas,
Which translates in Hebrew to
the Gift from God.
They fall to the ground,
Tumble gently, and cover the fountains
In anatomies of tulle and organza silk.
Icicles hang from the eyelashes
of streetlights, shaped like pyramids
and ice cream cones - unswayed
By winds roaring across the
lapel of the city at eighty five miles an hour.

Wake up, Odalis, wake up.
They're here, the snow flakes,
singing by your window pane,
smiling at your curtain rings -
While the sun is asleep,
behind a woolly gray sky,
and the moon is bathing in darkness.

On Thursday Morning

What I want today is to lay
on a bed of myrtles
and have the rain wash over me
Gently, yet erotically
Like we were in an orgy;
Drops, in acrobatic trajectories,
Tumbling down my cheeks,
My chest, and my narrow abdomen.
My head, tilted East,
My fingers trembling with the boiling hormones
My brain howling,
My eyes meditating, like iridescent orbs on which
Shadows of galaxies converge in a cone.
On which pockets of shadows become permanent dreams.
On which pixels and voxels carving reality
Become summer clouds or smoke.
My legs form the rivers
On which hyacinths grow, and lilies blossom,
Across which X-rays of water waves
Buckle into sounds of the magical Winter,
That is now.
 
Four degrees, Thursday morning,
I see the moon on the Eastside sidewalk,
Like a broken bowl of white porcelain,
Waiting for the evening,
To make love to the clouds.

Birthday Present

If I had at my disposal the ownership of Nature,
I would give to you, as your Birthday presents,
A garden of periwinkles, a tropical river,
A basket of hydrangeas, and a bottle of sunlight.

Instead, I gave you a greeting card,
Bought yesterday at the paper store,
With an image of a fluffy cake, covered
In buttercream and rainbow sprinkles.
And nine candles with colored stripes,
Rooted within. 

 

January

For Eva, my dead sunflower.

I.

From the aircraft, the clouds look like clumps of wisteria blossoms. And the sky is an emulsion of orange and pink. The sun is hazy along the Western horizon, where waves and froth from water bodies smoothen out and burble. I hear the sounds the bubbles make, imagine a river flowing through my body, and smile to myself.

What comes to mind is the Mourner's Prayer, the one you say at the synagogue each week in memory of your grandmother Denise, and the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust having no one left to pray for them. Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba... Your eyes well up with tears, and we hug in consolation. Memories are all we have.

II.

I close my eyes, and an image of you floats in front of me. You, walking through a garden of wild nasturtiums, in a watered silk shirt and marigold culottes, with birds-of-paradise feathers hemmed to your collar, carrying in your left hand a copy of The Kite Runner, and in your right, a mandolin. The Santa Ana winds are percussing your face, creating an accordion of sounds and murmurs. And against the canvas of a bright copper sky, knots of clouds are floating.

III.

I ask you, Ida, did you hear the sound of rain at night? You say, Of course I did, it was beautiful; like a clamoring of pearls, like the whistling of rummaging thrush birds. But do you know, Ida, how old Monsoon is? You say, I don't, but the ocean does. 

IV.

I bought you at the Queens Market near Sunnyside in September, and now you are dying of frostbite from when I was away in Santa Catarina, short of unfurling your petals. Your green stem is now a piece of wire, and the leaves are stiff, rattling in the winds. As morbid as it may seem, you are like my dead baby, with a date of birth, an expiration, and a bundle of memories.

So long Eva Jane, may you rest in peace.
 

In Houston, Tonight

In my hotel room tonight,
I imagine you asleep,
like a tender stephanotis,
Your lips at a distance,
curved like rainbows,
reminiscing dreams from Belgium -
The sky is a shade of indigo
And the clouds are restless on the horizon.

On the ottoman, you look
Like a folded leaf;
gazing at a distance, where the world
behind your glass windows,
rests on your shoulder.
And sings of silence,
the galaxy, and azalea farms.

 

New Year's Eve

Against the lights, that glimmered
like polychromatic crystals,
along the French windows,
of the downtown restaurant,
you looked young
and fresh, and energetic.

Your skin was the color
of gardenia petals,
and your eyes,
the color of the universe.

Pages from a Sketchbook

V.

December seventeenth, 2015. Upper East Side, East 71st Street and Lexington Avenue. The evening stretches across a cloudless sky, over the balcony where I sit with ink and paper, gazing at the stars, thinking, intermittently, about Christmas lights and Eddie John.

I was at Bergdorf Goodman yesterday looking at window displays at the Women's storefront, when a Korean man walked up to me and said, Photography please? For mother of dead child. Home, across waves. I dropped my tote bag on the sidewalk, as he positioned himself in front of the 'Crown Jewels', and took three photographs on his phone -two vertical, one horizontal, without flash. He shook my hand, and thanked me, as I noticed the reflections of two sparkling lions floating across his eyeballs. Last time New York, bad lung cancer. They say metastases into my brain, he remarked. A chortle resurfaced. And he left, a shadow following him, resizing in dimensionality across pleats of lights strung from poles like sparkling sequins. I never got his name, and I forgot my tote bag. But I thought of oleander, the plant, its red pigmentation, and mother of a dead child on Christmas.

When I reached 'Gliterrati -Swarovski', I paused for a minute and put eye drops on my left eye. Passersby were headed South to Saks Fifth Avenue, and tourists with expensive cameras chattered about the miracle of New York during autumn and the holiday-time. I had felt nostalgic all day after seeing a photograph of Mother on Facebook at an aunt's birthday party on Belvedere Road, as I stared at the wrinkles bunching around her eyes as a pronouncement of age and wept out loud; my mother, who I have not seen in five whole years, and who I can only recollect through photographs and images. And seeing mothers embracing sons and grandsons in the middle of the holiday crowd, only escalated my nostalgia. Despite my misgivings, I stared at the Gliterrati display for several minutes, and noticed in its midst a pair of diamond chandeliers, tiered cakes made of zircon, three mannequins studded with peridots and emerald cloaks, a guitar made of amethyst, a candle made of ruby, and ice cream cones made of sapphire. Strings of garnet hung from the ceiling, and fake flames of tourmaline quivered to mechanized gusts of ventilation, internalized within the seams of a Swarovski display. The set sparkled and dazzled with flashes of lights, and occasionally, volcanoes of pearls spurt in angles and fell to the floor, trailing tracks designed with citrine and bloodstones. Cherry blossoms of rubies sprouted at the edges, and curtains of twill aquamarine hung below. A gliterrati, literally, so bold and powerful, so magical and magnificent, that the intensity of the moment along with nostalgia made me cry, quietly, as the tears fell and disappeared into my skin.

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.
 

What is your name?

A memory of the two of us kissing by the bar stools, our fingers touching, our knees half-bent, lingers in my mind. That Wednesday night, you in gray, myself in purple, liquor on our breaths, we chatted about the New York Stock Exchange. You touched my leg but I didn't move away, I didn't flinch -I normally do because I dislike being touched -and pulled me closer, my heart against your scruff, my words against your ears, and said Can I kiss you, please?

I said, Yes, you may, you may kiss me hard.

And we did. A geometric reciprocity in which our lips turned angles, our tongues arched within the hollow of our mouths, and my body shuddered with a rush of excitement. My fingers traced the shape of your ears, your moles, the bumps from your bicycle crash on Bliss Street-Rivington Avenue, and slumped over your bony shoulders. You took my hands, cupped them against your left palm and stared into my eyes, dilated from gin, as the disco lights changed colors: red and green, to harvest yellow, to aquamarine.

I am not rich, you said, but I can keep you happy.

And I cried. So much, that it stained my shirt, I noticed the next morning. The kind of tears that falls when liquor gives release to a depressed brain; a brain seethed in ambiguity and self constructed insecurities. A brain that wants to speak but has no audience sans judgment. And it felt good. Frankie Valli played on the speakers above our heads. The couple to our right fought about a ball game. You held me closer and uttered words that I cannot even remember, but all I craved was a moment of silence. A quiet, a pause. The traffic lights turned red. Bar-goers stepped out for a whiff of smoke. I placed my ears along the ridge of your chest, your sky blue shirt slightly unbuttoned, and closed my eyes. It felt amazing. Wonderful, the comfort you can feel within the depths of a stranger.

 

Sometimes I try to erase this memory, flick away this image the way I would a sea shell into sand dissipating from its shoreline, but the textures and smells, the granularity of emotions stays cocooned within the mirage of my happiness, that condenses and vaporizes along life. And then I pause, appreciating circumstance, and move on with the circus.  

A Fall Evening

Three blocks away, from my home on Lexington, is the Olmsted and Vaux way. On 72nd Street, where Bethesda Fountain and Darwin's Bust meet along a curvaceous jugular. The water spins on stone, gurgling and splashing along boats that drift along a display of round lotus pads.

A colonnade with pollarded trees, birches and magnolia blooms, sunlight streaming through a mesh of Eucalyptus branches, sits like a phonograph at the toe of the Meadow, bearing troubles and tragedies of 9/11, John F. Kennedy, and Lebanese tourists. 

And I sit to watch the sunset. The summer night has passed. The indigo has melted into a can of early darkness. 

The sun floats from the very top of me to the right, where I sit, facing a businessman arguing on his telephone, unveiling with its very movement a diaphanous veil. 

The clouds, like orange rinds, slosh across an Autumn sky, as the sun, the color of cantaloupe, drifts behind. The air whistles. The birds chirp. Lights from sky scrapers glitter at a distance. And the sky, ink-blue, with clouds around the edges, bundle above a pale horizon where Summer is asleep.

The orange turns pink, then an eggplant purple. Fireflies dance along low lying shrubs, like a gymnasium of pearls. Like flames of lanterns, translucent like lozenge, and refractive like crystal. Ululating in a buzz, as grasshoppers chyme and katydids lisp ballads to the moon.

The indigo percolates through the clouds, until it is black all around. And still. And people walk using flashlights. Police cars make rounds. The viola player stays. The soprano sings to a lithograph of Bela Fleck and Washburn. And I read dedication plaques, the metal cool from the sunset. I reminisce your smile, a crochet design over the cushion cover, and a snippet from your letter that read 'I know that you are a kind, giving man...' Tears burst through the traffic of blood around my eyes. And I am at once bawling. Howling across the fountain, where the saxophonist has paused for a sip of cold soda. I have only taken. Given nothing since I have moved. For which I am immediately ashamed. 

The orange and purple and blue and indigo have slipped away to a different country, where orphans, maybe, are flying kites. Where fishermen are sowing nets or are mired in prayers. Where a museum  is dark. Or a daughter knits garlands of camellias and tube roses. The blue nights are gone and the days are shorter. The rustling of red leaves have gotten louder and louder. The cycle of seasons is now at the cusp of temperatures, casting whispers to trees and hands of clocks. 

An Autumn Night - the sounds within, fold and refold into threads of a Taffeta ribbon, spindling along the circles of a sensible tongue. So plush and cosy, the skies seem soft, and fragrant from spices in nearby households. The orange clouds raw, diffuse into the geometry of constellations, into a night sky of jewels, where stars twinkle, and lights from air planes sprint across. And I walk back home. Filled with a sense of wonderment. Content and peaceful. And at ease.