Poetry

 

 

Gerry LaFemina

What It Means

Like the Turin shroud,
with its image of godliness,
consider how her yoga mat holds
the tattoo of her body. Each pose,
perhaps, noted by a particular
indentation, a stain of perspiration.
I've slept in beds that still held
the ghosts of former lovers
& have been haunted for days
afterward. Haunted for weeks.
The sky gunmetal gray,
darkening. Today, I want
to downward dog there
just to inhale the scent of her—
how I might howl. So much of love
is imagination—its over-activity,
its over-ambition, its over-the-top
faith. Is this what it means
to be a believer? She practices
breath & posture, knows
the variations of each. Science tells us
only one version of the story, scripture
another. When she's done,
she rolls her mat like a scroll,
sets it aside, her skin mottled
sweaty, her final meditation
a white fire on her tongue. My body:
a wick, a fuse, a bottle rocket.
Those women, the third day—
did they hold that burial cloth
to their noses? breathe in? believe?

 

The Flat Iron District

On the corner of 23rd & Broadway, William Seward
sits gazing westward. He can no longer see
New Jersey (if he ever could) or hear the park

winos unreel their stories: See, I learned
everything I could from the old hustlers. I knew
a guy in high school who worked

the Mercedes-Benz businessmen coming
across the George Washington Bridge. He wore
fishnet shirts & a needle-prick corsage

inside his arm. The money's too good,
he swore, his voice vibrating like the apex
of torch songs, the ones girls sang

in a school talent contest—that auditorium
in Chelsea, that last spring. … I fell in love
with each soprano, each alto, one at a time

& silently. Thus adolescence always was
what it's been ever since: just a statue,
though I shake my head at all its sadnesses.

Matt eventually died—not of AIDS or smack
or some dumb moment of violence
in the land of nods, but rather in a freak

scaffolding accident. The street singer
here at Madison Square Park does her best
Ella Fitzgerald, followed by her best Lady Day,

so that the young fathers pushing strollers
& the dog walkers & the morning-after lovers,
all of us—we don't stop, exactly,

but we do turn our heads, momentarily
pause our conversation. All of us, that is,
but for the panhandlers: they've seen enough

beauty & enough despair to know
such things are heads & tails of the same quarter,
& they know exactly what they'd spend it on, too.

She can really work it, one declares, but
it's way too early for her to make much. Whatever else
he says dissipates beneath the urgency of taxis

from 23rd Street before wind from the Northeast
brings the squeaky chains of swings
& the scent of halal food tempered by lilac.

 

Uptown Bus

The woman beside me, her head pressed
          to the window, weeps softly—sometimes
wearying a tissue beneath her eyes. Like my joy,

her grief is private in this public space.
          It crests in waves. On the sycamores
the first autumnal leaves, flirtatious in all that

green. I once hated these buses—
          the traffic & the stop-go-stop of it
all—but I've sacrificed my right to complain

about anything, given it to this stranger.
          Let her cry. Let her curse,
for tomorrow will have its own checklist of kvetches—

bills to pay, delays, & the way
          a familiar kind of loneliness returns:
I'll wait for a phone call that may not come,

but today's mood catches on just
          its possibility. So easy to love
with such hope. On Sixth Avenue, a Hassid

hurries toward temple—he bears
          his pleasures & afflictions both,
on this: the last Sabbath before Atonement.

 

 

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