Stephen LewisGulls, Page 1
THE GULLS’ SWEETLY BANKED FLIGHT
A time ago, the parachute ride
presided over the summer swirl
of pastel yellows and purples that rose
from the shirts and shorts of those
seeking salt cool breezes at Coney Island.
They rode the roller coaster
through the black sky
charged with pink cotton candy,
and they waltzed the Ferris wheel
to the rhythms of the surf.
The parachute dwarfed these,
with its improbable structure,
like a giant steel mushroom
growing out of the sand,
its cables climbing to its cap
higher than the swoop of gulls,
or, even, the very moon at midnight.
There, sitting on the narrow seat
afloat between the wires,
I would climb forever
only to plummet for one long breath
toward the crowd that pulsed the boardwalk
and clogged the stall-lined streets
with life that has fronted death.
The oldest pressed flower in Brooklyn
lies between the pages of a farmer’s ledger
in the living room of a brownstone on Sackett Street.
That flower greeted the morning sun
a century ago in a Michigan field
where a young woman on her way
to tend the patient cows,
their udders pressed full,
paused for a moment's reflection
about the man she might have wed,
the hired hand paid by her father
more in lodging than wages.
But he could not abide
planting his hopes in the soil,
exposed to the whimsy of sun and rain.
She had marked how the wonder in his eyes
argued against the callouses on his hands
while he spoke his dreams,
and she would not tell him what she knew
would stay his leave.
She only stood with her back stiff
against the ivy covered post on her father's porch
listening to his invitation
to ride steel rails to streets
of stone and walls of brick,
knowing that her feet
must feel the moist grass,
her hair the wind before a summer's rain.
And so she knelt this August morning
while the cows snapped their tails,
hating the swell of her own belly,
her knees pressed into the black soil.
She studied the delicate purple flowers
atop the swollen pods,
and she imagined the seeds feather borne
on east blowing winds.
Her fingernail split the topmost pod,
and it dropped its thick milk over her hand.
She ran her fingers down the stalk,
closed them tight, and pulled just once.
She left the stalk with its crushed blossom
to wither among the numbers
that recorded a month's lodging and pay,
inscribed in the ledger on a page headed
"Cash Paid Out."
The man boarded the train,
and sat unblinking for a thousand miles
until the locomotive locked its wheels
on the new track of the terminal,
glass faced and steel bright.
He had chased his star's dream,
only to find himself working
beneath the waters of the black river,
scraping against the earth's crust
with pick and squared fingernails
as once he had furrowed its surface,
now planting a bridge
instead of rows of corn.
He had left the constellations
above the green fields
to lodge on the top floor
of a Brooklyn brownstone
where he dragged his body each night
to sleep a dreamless sleep,
indifferent to the coruscating life
across the waters,
the bright lights shut from him
behind his heavy lids.
One day he found his sturdy body
racked as though his very sinews
would crack and separate,
and he could labor no more.
He lay in his agony
as another summer's heat
pressed down through the soft tar
on the flat roof above his room,
and he thought of her that morning,
more unyielding as she stood before him
than the granite beneath the river.
He could sometimes still see
the gulls riding the currents
above the ploughed waves,
describing circles
that seemed to find him
the unmoving, and then,
unthinking center.
That desiccated flower
traveled the same tracks
the man had ridden a century before,
and as though governed by a private deity
whose sense of order, or humor,
demanded such patterning
of random circumstances,
the steps of their granddaughter
climbed the worn wooden stairs
of the house on Sackett Street
to the topmost apartment
where a ceiling fan now stirs the air
into small eddies over the open pages
of a farmer's account book that holds
the dust of a long forgotten blossom.
Drawn, as if by the gulls' graceful arc,
the young woman finds the old locus
of pain and aspiration
at the bottom of the great tower
whose twinned arches
frame the discordant skyline,
and order the jumble of shapes
like a cunning picture frame
over a collage of sky, stars,
and square patches of yellow light.
In the shadows at the river's edge,
where for a hundred years the water
has lapped the stubborn stone,
she encounters a waif
raised from the deep currents
who speaks to her the images
that teem in his swollen brain
and demand to splash on the quiet shore
of the night beneath the bridge.
He tells her of his conversations
with the broken shades of the men
on whose backs the bridge had risen.
She sees how his words ride the breezes
lifted from the river
seeking a place in the cracks
of the aspiring arches,
only to be scattered with the other debris
upon the surface of the water
to form another generation's precipitate,
unresolved among the ocean's waves,
far from the gulls' hoarse cries
and their sweetly banked flight.
From that height,
paused before the sudden fall,
and wrapped in the night's black blanket,
I discovered points of color
on the distant streets,
as though a giant box of crayons
had spilled from the heavens
and the shards of wax had fused
with the steaming asphalt.
Even the neon signs,
so blatant at ground level
appeared slashes of pastel
washed by the mist
that rose from the beach
to where I sat,
just a reach away
from white stars and yellow moon.
The drop sent death in a rush
to strip the blanket from me
as the bench plummeted.
Each time I knew that I would die,
but then the slide down slowed
and just before I landed,
I would find a face
with eyes struck open in wonder.
I would smile and tell myself
that I was alive.
In Brooklyn, borough of churches
and young men in undershirts,
I found her sending spiritual runners
over the sidewalks seeking the crevice
that would open the city to her,
and my feet, too, felt the throb
of the familiar terrain.
At night, she murmurs,
sleep, make love, smoke cigarettes,
her words whispered warm against my cheek,
her arms tight around my back,
the red glow from our fingers
stabbing the anarchic night at our window
to light the way to the street below
electric with adolescent obscenities,
Hey, Jesús, up yours, you mutha!
voices swallowed in the roar of trucks
and the rumble of the F train
beneath Smith Street.
We call out the window for Jesús,
the little street kid, the recylcer of hubcaps,
whom we imagine a wine bearer whose goblets
gather the sounds of the street
into a reification of that startling life
so near to our quiet bed,
a metaphor we can bend to our wishes,
knowing that its taut spring
will snap us together,
unresisting prisoners of the pulse
that sets the early summer stillness
into subtle movements
that rock the street to sleep
at dawn’s edge.
We lean our bare backs against the wall
to witness the performance,
sun and earth aligned to blacken the moon.
The bright yellow ebbs before the dark tide,
our view framed by our empty glasses
on the ledge next to the mattress.
A maple casts its shadow
over the still street, the quiet wrinkled
only by the breeze that ruffles the docile leaves.
Clouds hang like chiseled white rocks,
hewn from a giant and invisible mountain.
We watch the shadows cover the moon,
and then draw the blanket over us
as though the darkness
has chilled the sultry air.
Perhaps it is our recognition
of what the black portends
that moves us to hold each other into sleep,
or maybe it is the only the persistent breathing
that yawns up from the pavement,
inarticulate but just as hauntingly real
as the fleeting convergence
in time and space
of patterns beyond measure,
yet simple as a whispered embrace,
sleep, make love, smoke cigarettes.
The traffic beneath the promenade
quivers the bench on which we sit,
each shockwave a reminder of the metal river
that flows over the asphalt
and runs along the flank
of its mate, the river,
now burdened more by its past
than its present,
days when tallmasted ships
paused at wharves to relieve
the bulging warehouse on South Street,
and then cut their way to the ocean,
carrying something of the city’s ebullience,
and a little of its mystery,
leaving a ghostly wake of commerce
on the surface of the indifferent river.
A breeze passes through the cabled web
without ruffling the motionless lines,
and then reforms itself
beneath a drifting cloud
where a man and a woman,
sitting on a stone bench,
can join themselves
like the tension
between the huge towers,
each rooted in a separate past,
finding their soul’s core
in the finely ordered chaos
that is the city,
the random junctures
most truly expressed
in the charged stillness
of the bridge,
and in the inchoate feelings
that rise, as if bidden,
by the gentle June winds
to ride the currents of the river.
Then and now,
it would be simple to say,
becomes life and death,
but since the mitosis
of a simple cell
produces a globular mass,
the anlage of passion and reason,
we know that simple terms
will not suffice
to explain why the parachute
now stares blankly
over barren beaches
littered in wintertime
with a summer’s refuse
of beer cans and shards of glass,
or why the crowds
no longer seek the brisk breezes
of an August evening at Coney Island,
or why the gulls still circle
the ancient bridge at sunset,
their cries as unchanged
as the surf that crashes
against the damp shores,
against the empty echoes
of excited laughter,
still audible,
in the early morning hours
beneath the parachute,
a time ago.