Ken Siegelman
BENSONHURST
Like many
In these fig tree yards
He tended an ungiving vegetable garden
With shovels of measured spilling cow manure;
Cascaded wood stick baroque lattice arcs
Castled for grape vines
As if raising an ancient goblet in a toast
To the memories of Italy in a grandma fire escape song
From a century ago in the Lower East Side...
No one ever seems to hear
The seismic thunder of the El.
Just above New Utrecht Avenue;
Theirs is the stoicism of all the black dressed widows
Gnarling through their rosaries on front stoop chairs
As if the rest of Brooklyn and the City
Had long gone to hell all around them -
Never touching their Sundays -
Stirred into their gravy
With the determination of a chef
Conjuring the secret mix of ingredients
Locked up in the long term memories of the race.
And always,
It was the fathers;
Grandfathers
And all their sons
Conceived in parked Buicks with the passion
Of hot blooded Romeos who never read Shakespeare
Or heard of the Renaissance
But picked their Juliets out of convent homes
Just a few blocks away.
GERRITSEN BEACH
Green cut-out Shamrocks
Still triad many of the front windows, clustering
At Easter
Much the way some outside Christmas lights
Always seem to linger well into mid-February...
An old plaid man in a New York cab cap
Stares into his small frontal patch
Tossing chunks of Italian bread
To Brooklyn squirrels at the highest levels of
Domesticity...
The day is Liverpool gray,
Dublin in its harmony of the Chieftain’s music
Piping and fiddling out of an open
Side window...
Small, low-slung bungalows I remember
Seeing in Old Rockaway
Tar and reface here into the pretense
Of something more exclusive
As if they understand that the other Rockaways
Are gone and only reappear
On St. Patrick’s day and in AA meetings;
Assembled and dispersed in hours...
Walking past St. James there are times
When adults unleash their dogs
Silhouetted by the inlet reflecting
Off the Great Salt Marsh to the East.
There are the hours when neighborhood kids
Act beer-tough,
But they too are just passing by,
As much as they seem to permanently belong.
Perhaps it is just the shaking, jolting
Bush tail grays
Darting out like a half-remembered dream
Which makes this bog as haunting to the senses
As it was to the first Celts when they arrived?
FLATLAND SCHOOL
The fourth grade boys are shouldered against
The brick school wall;
Uniformed girls locked backhand at the wire fence
Facing across from them.
The young blonde teacher parts the two
As if by willowing her arms she can move
the gates and brick miles apart;
Waving an infinite birth between them -
It is the elemental body language
Set for the ritual of Catholic school dances
A few years off...
Just enough familiarity
To blushingly smile the half nod across the gym
Of asking someone to dance;
Wilding the imagination
In every effort not to touch
When touching is the all important thing...
The swirling rapture of a slipping hand
Pulling back
but waiting for a second slip
Permissioned by a hinted smile...
Then, the spinning bottle
watching her eyes
Liding at yours,
To discover if she also wills the bottle
To stop where you wish it to...
And, all too quickly,
The bottle ambering
With the giggling abandonment
Of any awkwardness,
As if that fourth grade teacher
Never was,
Segregating the two of you
Every day that year
Long ago.
