New Amsterdam Triptych

I.

The plumes of blue forgiveness open

Their closed blinds – and onto the white lights

Of the City, on rooftops, fluff and tobacco shops,

The Village night of Shih Tzu’s and vintage clothes

Through someone else’s eyes to not see through –

New York turned to California while I was gone,

Cigarbars now organic smoothie sheds, the smell of weed

Replacing that of hoisin.

                                                   Every 5 years one should check in,

As on an old lover, the one you made laugh and thought

That meant they cared. Though lambs now graze to

Gregorian chants by the locked church graves of saints,

And unicycles now have brake lights, Afros are jejeune,
And the Village Voice is nothing but a yard of weeds, 

Not much else has changed; they still complete each other’s 

Sentences, the beard on Peter Cooper’s statue still is

Growing, the Jews for Jesus still are chanting along

With new white folk song protests against white supremacy,

And the old man with the gut bucket still plays for change

On the pallets of a long-defunct gas station.

II.

The same moving, to the same unknown destination

Happens here, where light islands through the trees

Shine on passersby who look any which way but the sky

In a world a few miles away, where hemlocks imbued

With college ivy open for sun from the expressway,

And birds move the light as they dance on the leaves.

The trains skim golden, overgrown green

Satellite towns of leaf and seed, where high-rise strands 

Are lifted by sun, the river uncovered to its silted branches

And fly-whipped fish, its leaves and ripples flowing 

Without a gate but light.

                                               The ancient dappled trees 

Are lines of reasoning that reach to the sun, spread bolts 

Of branches charged with new green thinking, as horizon eaves 

Hang like rotted slabs, and roots unable to loosen 

From sodden banks turn fruit for bracket fungi shelves

That give their smoke to the light, like white-edged strings

Of butterfly wings caught in mid-flap up the bark ...

The sheen of mud ... the shine of berries …

                                                                                What formlessness

Feels like, against the shadows of expression. The white

Glints in winks across the warping water ridges. The pockets

Of light are their own sphere, that joins with what is there, 

Inside river canopies, where capillaries fill the sweeping 

Curve of sky, with its still, equally unreadable calligraphies. 

Eyes at all levels revel in the reveal, though knowledge is 

Patchy and the robe doesn’t touch except as heat. Yet, 

Wherever such light joins, there is beauty.

III.

Waiting for it, on Crosby Street again, where the ghosts

Of the art from the dead who once lived here vie

For no eyes, while pigeons drop from trees on the people

Putting it out there at Washington Square. Here, a man

With mouse shoes and continuous talk tries to catapult his glory

Onto the next passerby, unaware of all who’ve come before,

Who made him what he wants to be.

                                                                    The Manhattan wind

Of mind, once it’s passed through, offers nothing but concrete,

The windows that once saw the crystalline vision of a city

Still see nothing by themselves, but refract back 

Whatever the onlooker brings, and the ateliers 

Still live only in the sound of their pipes, 

And the way their lights turn on and off.

                                                                          The walls outside

Are a stiff impasto palimpsest of the posters of events

Of yore, as if they lived forever, as if the thick black letters

Now on top are memories of nights their magic cast

Its spell … but it was made to be disposable, to be of use

In the endless longing to be seen and known, and the

Endless need to see and know –

                                                            The girl has moved on

To be part of another place that will take her temporarily,

In a flutter of chatter how "she fits, she fits" magnificently

In the center of a world that was created in that moment.

Everything else is history, the rust of water borne from

Tower tanks above; it all exists, like the vokka moon,

The CBD mocha, the skater’s knitwool beanie, to clothe a wound

That isn’t even aware of its own bleeding,

                                                                            So when the gallery

Viper passes by the earnest faces and thoroughly conceived plans

To reach for some amorphous splatter of blood, it’s also of a

Moment that’s already past, so there's no loss of hope, as they look

To the sky for the new, despite endless crushing disappointment

That at the time seemed like a pleasant waste of time,

To exalt something that might just do the impossible,
What we’d never otherwise let it do: Define us
In a way that includes.