A Song for New York
by Maggie Dubris
A Song for New York
1.
I’ve always had this perverse desire
to live in the Last Days. To never
be eclipsed by the future.
What remains of the games we play?
The lamp that burns a lifetime
carefully tended by vanished hands.
The walls it shone on, collapsed.
Streets smeared into gullies.
Just a place for meteors to smash down
into the endlessly shifting sand.
Hickory, chestnut, hemlock, plum
An elm to hang the traitors from
How many miles to Babylon?
A thousand gone and a thousand more
O’er land and sea and wind and shore
Sailing for a new world bright.
But will I find that new world bright?
Yes! No! Maybe! Go!
Count the stars on a moonless night.
One–two–three–four
Dolly dollar, how you wander
Five–six, over, under
And you–will–cast–off !
With a naked eye, in the wander world, visible stars (invisible girl.)
2.
Is it strange to love something that can’t love you back? The wild plants
are being threatened by the decline of the natural pollinators.
Bees and insects, hummingbirds. Wind.
How can the wind go extinct? It can’t. No.
The windy wind is always with us. Anemones were once believed
to open only at the wind’s bidding. The name means ‘wind–flower’
in Greek. You can buy the pink and purple bouquets
at the Indian grocery on Fourth Street, a Mexican
teenager out front shaving the stems with a straight razor
binding them together with rubber bands.
When I arrived, I was a morning dove.
Manhattan was a tangle of hackberries,
cherries, elderberry, and sugar maples.
Pokeweeds, knotweeds, milkweed, and wild leek.
The chestnut trees are gone now. The hills plowed flat.
If there was a glacier here once, who would know it? On this August
afternoon, swooping between the towers
heat waves radiating from the pavement below.
3.
I never went to college
I never went to school
But when it’s time to shake that thing
I shake it like a fool!
Singing, go down baby by the rollercoaster
Sweet sweet baby, I’ll never let you go
Once Harlem was a meadow filled with flowers
Once sassafras and grape and thorny rose
Once Manhattan was a shadow filled with hours
Beside the eelgrass river long ago.
No, I never was a rich girl
I never was so cool
But when the men say, shake it girl
I shake it like a fool
Singing, go down baby by the rollercoaster
Sweet sweet baby, I’ll never let you go
And just because I kissed you once
Just because I kissed you once
Oh, just because I kissed you once
Doesn’t mean I love you so
4.
The trees of New York were mostly all killed to make way for the city.
But on the north–west corner of Washington Square Park is
a three–hundred year old tree, the Hangmen’s elm.
In Stuyvesant park is an elm believed to be nearly two–hundred years old.
The St. Nicholas Elm stands where George Washington stood
on September 28, 1776, to watch the torching of the city by the American
rebel army. These trees are all English Elms
carried across the sea by English settlers.
On Doyer Street, in Chinatown,
a string of dried seahorses hangs in the pharmacy window.
Seahorses live in the eelgrass of the East River.
When my leg was broken, I drank tea
made from dried beetles that looked
like waterbugs. You see
I am the city, and the city is me.
We’re exactly the same. Me and my metropolis. In the summer
My breath grows salty, like the wind off the river.
The smog becomes my skin, folding me in. And my feet
are a heartbeat on the pavement, lub–dub
Lub–dub. All the breath around me all the fans
spewing hot bedroom air into the night. I pant and sweat
and the brown fog burns away.
Every morning I get up
drink some water from the tap
splash some water on my face
and lean out into the brand new day.
5.
Two old winos, sitting on a bench
Trying to make a dollar out of eighty–five cents
Yelling, shake it senorita, shake it if you can
Shake it like a milkshake, and shake it once again.
It’s been this way for all of time
When there was only fire to see
Oceans watching, endless seas
And the moon in the water
And the moonlight in the weeds.
A hundred thousand blue crabs live in the murky green bed of the Hudson.
Crabs in the river, crabs in the bed
Called up the doctor and the doctor said:
Let’s get the rhythm of the crab, dib–dab,
Hey get the rhythm of the crab (bob head)
Let’s get the rhythm of the tide, reed–ride,
Now get the rhythm of the tide (clap twice)
Let’s get the rhythm of the street, soot–sweet,
Got to get the rhythm of the street (stomp twice)
Let’s get the rhythm of the hot! Doooog!
Ooh get the rhythm of the hot hot dog (thrust hips)
Put it all together, now what do you get?
Put it all backwards, now what do you get?
6.
A lot of broken hearts out there on the Deuce.
I once studied physics, and this is what I learned.
The shattered remains of a person tell us a great deal
about their past. How they broke. When they broke. Why they broke.
In the 1800s, many New York men listed their occupation as organ grinder.
In the 1980s, many New York men who rode in my ambulance
listed their home address as none.
The whores all came from Minnesota. Tottering down 11th Avenue with their hair fluffed up and ham–fat
white legs busting through their fishnets. Hiking up one hip
at the cars, heading for 42nd Street the Deuce the wild
Deuce, Church’s 24–hour fried chicken, Show–World, Peep–World
The Parisian Follies with its girly–girl–girls
flashing pink and white all night long.
An interesting fact about passenger pigeons
is that they were actually more
like particles than birds. Big messy
raucous particles that followed precise
paths, never deviating, for reasons
no man has yet been able to determine. Maybe
that was why we eliminated them.
Or maybe, they just flew away.
On their trusty wings.
Headed west, towards the sun
so dazzling orange on their orange wings
forever setting, yonder, three million
strong, and when one flock dipped
to avoid a hawk, each flock following dipped
at the exact same spot, for all the days it took
that great orange wheel to pass.
7.
I open my eyes, another fiery morning, in this world that jingle–jangle–jingles
tangling Senegal into China
into Ecuador, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam
that big red sun rolling merrily along
rock doves into pigeons
India to Queens, the ginko
and the English elm rooting
down into Manhattan schist, Shakespeare’s starlings
set loose in Central Park and where did the all the heath hens go,
the chestnuts and the Lenape?
Is there another new world
twisting together, somewhere just over
the horizon, on the way to someplace else?
Passenger pigeons, indigenous only to North America
were once the most numerous bird on earth. The last passenger pigeon
died September 1st, 1914, at one in the afternoon
and the species faded at that moment into extinction.
8.
One summer, in some scrubby plains near Sheridan, Wyoming
I spent every afternoon sitting by a creek, looking for wildlife.
There was a hole that nothing ever came out of, and the whirling
of insects, and birds I heard but never saw. I
dressed in drab colors, keeping perfectly still.
Once, near twilight, I saw a softshell turtle
lurch up from the water, her neck as big around as my arm.
I’d never seen anything like it.
She looked like she had tunneled through from another time.
On the corner of 56th Street and 8th Avenue was a bench
with a larger than life sized statue of Ronald McDonald sitting on one end.
He was bright red and bright yellow, with a big happy smile.
A little too happy. And one arm stretched
along the top of the bench, like he was making a pass at a ghost.
No one ever sat next to him. We used to watch the winos perch there
with their butts hanging halfway off, trying to
get as far away from his big red hand as possible.
No matter how late it got
or how drunk they got
they never, ever, slumped against him.
9.
Aristotle believed that plants have souls, but no sensation.
A blackberry bush changes direction if its shoots touch another plant.
Not to avoid it, but to curl around and strangle it.
A voice said, cry.
Where shall I cry?
All flesh is grass, and the brightness thereof
is as the flowers of the field.
Minetta Brook wandered through Greenwich Village
past the potters field that became a gallows ground
now a park where men peddle spitback and loose joints
banks lined with swamp milkweed, turtlehead, rose mallow, and lady fern
forced underground in the 1800s, still flowing her old course
beneath the rumbling streets
bubbling into a small fountain
in front of Number Two Fifth Avenue.
Down by the riverside I smell rain coming. In the wind
on the bike path, with geese squawking to the west of me and a
rusty chain link
to the east. The smell of a storm rolling in is actually the smell of plant oils
in the soil, released when the humidity rises high enough. In the East Village
I never smell the storm approaching. But in summer, there’s a smell; rain
on the hot dirty sidewalk. It smells beautiful to me.
10.
Hickory, dickory, mintery, corn
Apple seed and locust thorn
Wild tobacco, limber lock|
Rufous pigeons in a flock
Hukka pukka, sassafras gum
Blow the bellows
Fire the drum
Name the trees of the city
Ginko, Norway Maple, Ailanthus, London Plane.
All carried here in the holds of ships,
to live with their captors in this new land.
The ginko fruit stinks. It’s the size of a crabapple, the color of an apricot
and smells like rotten butter. If the pulp touches your dress, you can never
get rid of the smell. It won’t wash out. Ginkos no longer reproduce in the
wild.
The trees once sent their spores into the wind, like a primitive fern.
Hundreds of years ago, they stopped doing this. No one knows why.
The females have been culled from the cities, to rid us of their fruit.
Males are grown instead, from cuttings. Ginkos lived on the earth
for a hundred million years. They are the sole reminder of an ancient breed.
A ginko tree survived the bombing of Hiroshima.
11.
The pier at 44th Street, where I used to sit and watch the sunset
while the old Chinese men fished,
is a native plant preserve now. There were sinkholes in the wood
where the tar patches had given way and you could see the water.
At night, it was a rat carnival. In 1996
a group of residents got a grant, and built planters from cedar, brick,
and redwood,
four feet wide and twenty feet long. They filled them with plants
that grew here before the Europeans arrived.
There was a man named Angelo who lived there in a low, white shack.
There was a man with two dogs, in a lean–to made of blankets.
Blazing star. Seaside goldenrod. Beebalm.
There was a drag queen bar on Twelfth Avenue.
Sometimes a man in heels and a dress
would stagger across the highway and pass out
his head against the wood. They want to build more planters.
The sound of the Hudson river at night
lapping against the side of the Intrepid.
Sundrops. Switchgrass. Chokeberry.
I wish I was there again
but it’s locked up after dark.