New York: A Love Story

It was 1996, and I was dating a poet who lived in Spanish Harlem. I called him Blue, and he called me Miriam and left little notes all over my apartment. I'd go to light a cigarette or open the fridge for juice, and there I'd find--in his scribbled hand--a tiny fading note. I found them for years, actually: Trumpet, or, The sky was crooked, or, This is not a metaphor: my heart is full.

But the night I'm remembering we were in his apartment, his tiny, dirty apartment. It was late October, and I was wearing that old army jacket, and we were sitting on a futon mattress on the floor trying to break up. He was crying; I was sopping up pizza grease with a paper napkin. You, he said, are the coldest person I have ever known. (This haunted me for years. Am I cold? I'd ask people, particularly after wild displays of warmth.)

And then, suddenly, in the midst of one of our painful long silences, we heard something coming from outside. The whole city was going wild. Horns honked, and music played, and we ran to the window and pushed it open and let the cold air rush in. The streets were filled with people celebrating. "What the hell happened?" my poet yelled.

We were lost, two flights up, wild-haired in the wind. A man looked up at us. "The Yanks just won the World Series, you #**##%! idiots!" Before we knew it, we were out in the street, holding hands and laughing and the whole city was on fire. Those moments were so magical--so alive and spirited--that we stayed together for a couple of months--me and the poet--and while we never did manage to fall in love, it was that night that I fell so hard for New York that I knew that I'd never want to leave.

Day 337

Yesterday, Eva, you had a balloon, and you wouldn't let go of it, and so I worried that you would suddenly let go of it and that it would float up into the blue, and you would cry and cry, and it would be a lesson on how balloons float away if you don't hold onto them. Finally, it occurred to me that I could tie it to your wrist and save you, at least for a little bit, from having to learn that lesson, and so I did, and then we played and played, and later it came undone and floated away, but by then our minds were somewhere else, and we hardly even noticed as it got smaller and smaller before disappearing entirely.

Send in the Clowns

Subway Poem 10

An Orthodox boy carries a hat box
And stares at an old map.
He's never been where he's going.

And beyond him, another man
With hundreds of keys
And a black umbrella.

I want to tell him how cloudless
It is above ground,
Tell him his umbrella is useless.

Here, a baby cries,
And down in Memphis,
A baby waits to be born.

Yesterday, my oldest friend asked
If we ever get over the past.
I thought of him all those miles
And years and years away.

I sure hope not.

Subway Poem 9

I've got a rubber chicken
In a plastic bag
And I'm Coney Island bound
On the F-train

People are wearing pearls
And smacking gum
And reading the Post


And I'm wondering
If before all this
There was a rubber egg
If it came first
Came before this chicken

Wondering if home will come first
Come before the cyclone and the sea
Wondering if these doors will open
And I'll wander out to find a saner me

Day 331

O, Evabird, I'm baffled by how much there is to teach you. This is the fall, and these are the leaves and this is what the leaves do in the fall; this is the ground; (that is the crunch of the leaves that you hear with your ears! & these are your ears!); this is a wheelbarrow, and over there is a pumpkin; this is an orange pumpkin in a blue wheelbarrow under an even bluer sky; this is green and this is red, and red means stop, or sometimes love, and green means go or grass or that you may be feeling ill or envious, or that spring is near because the tips of trees are turning green, but spring is really not near at all; this is fall, and then there will be winter, and it will snow, and I will worry about all the things I may have forgotten, and I will wish us another thousand seasons and hope that in them, everything else will come.

Subway Poem 8

The tunnel was dark.
The woman was warm.
Would you rather be light?
The woman asked.
Would you rather be cold?
The tunnel replied.
The woman said nothing.
Instead, she stepped onto the train,
Pulled her hair off her neck
To cool herself

And in the sway of the train
And the dark of the window
She made a list of all
That she had ever loved.
You were there, of course,
On the list, along with the birds
And fall and falling,
But then there were other things,
Darker things, tunnels, silences.
And the list grew and grew
Until it became something else entirely,
Something silver and filled



And hidden under the city,
Something pulsing, vibrant,
Entirely unseen from the sky,
Almost invisible in its desire.