The Ticket from Amsterdam

New York City

1.
There’s not much here that can’t be fixed
with silver paint, but damn, Manhattan
does more with black than any artist I know.

Corrugated with layers of not only people
but spirits and angels like dissolved sugar,
its stone-masoned mountains of grainy greys
disappear as purple inner light rolls in.

It’s a rainy night, filled with liquid reflections
from Times Square, epicenter of the universe,
where tourists buy cosmetics with 100 dollar bills.

The Empire State Building is shrouded in mist,
the publishing monoliths stand tall and indifferent,
but across the street, on the front of Rockefeller Center,
Poetry and its muse leap from a mosaic
—forever lost in a deco decadence.

How could that melting candy spire
—the top of the Chrysler Building—
outlast the commotion and flesh on the trading floor,
how can it overcome all these dreams?

And Grand Central, the mightiest of rivers,
despite its caves and passageways, its histories of art,
its zodiacs and chandeliers, comes down to one thing:
the look of the ticket window clock.

2.
A million bobbing heads, each to its own
rhythm, each a beat in the whole, tribal drum.
The City orchestrates all those individual wills
without them even knowing how it works.

People are springing through the most crowded streets,
fitting to the grid, a fierce move to freedom,
like the steam from the rooftop machines.

Faces fractured and worn, like Greek statues
—oh to be human!

The nosebleed subterraneans,
the beggars in their suits,
the would-be models in their wheelchairs,
the clear-eyed geniuses screaming gobbelty-gook.

An Ethiopian woman looks like Shelley Duvall,
a man in a business suit rides a bicycle,
even the spaingers here are professional,
wear pink Yankee caps.

The ineluctable kindness of the social
knows many guises: smiles, glassy eyes,
meanness that is always something else.

The eyes are still alive,
despite the dead veneer,
the eyes are still alive!

3.
There are so few people, for all of the land,
always a tree taking over.

The walls straight-on, their brick and tar,
are inaccessible, like ghost figures,
but when they are beyond the green,
barely seen, like the distant sea,
I see how things are made, lives are lived,
from attic windows dreams are formed.

Above the honey locust wilds,
red airport lights on the top of the projects.

Above it all, I hear the flow of the vast invisible
—the arteries and veins, the all-important pipes.