Manhattan Melody Read online

  MANHATTAN

  MELODY

  Patricia Faith Polak

  Copyright © 2017 Patricia Faith Polak.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Archway Publishing

  1663 Liberty Drive

  Bloomington, IN 47403

  www.archwaypublishing.com

  1 (888) 242-5904

  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

  ISBN: 978-1-4808-5386-7 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4808-5387-4 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4808-5388-1 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916667

  Archway Publishing rev. date: 11/14/2017

  CONTENTS

  Practicing One’s Craft

  Zum Zum

  The Classical Age

  Write as Rain

  Tempo of the City

  Mornings at Seven

  Nocturne

  The Bronze

  Vignettes

  Allies Day: Childe Hassam

  Heavy Metal

  The Boulevardier’s Dawn / Cocktail Hour

  Pictures at an Exhibition: New York City

  Some Irreparable Loss

  The Gothamburg Bible

  Can You Hear Me, Watson?

  The Gypsy Teakettle

  Urban Landscape: The Metropolitan Museum

  Photomontage: Bleecker Street

  Elegy in a City Boneyard

  Vincero

  The World’s Oldest Writing in the Trade Tower Holocaust

  The Aberrant Storm

  Carousel in Winter

  Toni

  Buskers

  Bubble, Bubble

  To Jumble

  If, by Chance

  Dolce Far Niente

  The Saint’s Day Party

  Eight O’Clock

  The Grasshopper

  Art Is Not a Brassiere

  Ne Plus Ultra

  Reverie

  Barcarole

  Urban Homesteading

  Blizzard Day: New York

  The Big Bang

  Our Town

  The Brandenburg Concertos: Snowy Manhattan

  Twenty-Four-Dollar Real Estate

  The City Karooms across My Bedroom Wall

  Portrait

  Vantage

  Nighthawks (1942)

  Ferries

  Rain Tattoo

  Dedication

  To: Emil J.

  Always Believer

  Cliffie

  brother taken by leukemia

  Inspiring Angel

  Donald

  once physics major

  Haunting brotherly part of me

  Acknowledgments

  For my parents: Ruth Barbara and Joseph Patrick Leuzzi

  You gave a legacy of words, and

  fashioned me a debutante

  Ever gratitude for the refined intellect of Sister Dorothy Mercedes of the Sisters of St. Joseph, debating coach at The Mary Louis Academy. Kudos to those dauntless ones, ever tried to teach me to sit a saddle. Exuberant riding in the Moscow Hippodrome, and being part of a Polish wedding on horseback. (Jumping Captain Protein!) A modicum of political science in the classroom at Trinity College, Washington, DC, and on Capitol Hill. Worked in the world of finance. If no fulsome pension from the years with Brahmin John Train, inculcated to write a lyric with “strong muscular verbs.” Enormous indebtedness for the academic welcome given at SUNY Empire, and the many kindnesses shown by alumni administrator, Toby Tobrocke—veritably life changing. From Manhattanville’s Master’s program, an experience in erudition and elegance, Suzannah Lessard; and tragically passed too soon, the exceptional mind of John Herman.

  Thanks to friends extraordinary in their own rights—Mimi Leahey and her highly talented spouse Scott Nangle, Portia Redfield, Linda Sullivan; and cousins Therese Southworth, Carolyn Rose Vadala, and wishing the distance nearer, Paula and Susan Sonnichsen. Heartfelt credit to a brilliant doctor, Daniel Goodman, MD. Truly missed the late Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Bass and Lucia Capodilupo, PhD. For generosity enabling us to expatriate to Sayville, Long Island, and living space (to work on the novel!), Bill Venegas. Finally, paws, from a Bowser Great Beyond, Ginger and Cupid; and now the rescue felines—Flash and Foxy—think iambs are catnip.

  Manhattan Melody

  Of the book’s fifty poems, eighteen have been previously published in the following journals.

  Art Is Not a Brassiere

  Caveat Lector

  Dolce Far Niente

  Word(s) 77

  The Saint’s Day Party

  Forge

  Eight O’Clock

  Inkwell

  Heavy Metal

  Big Scream

  Mornings At Seven

  Land of Compassion (online)

  Nighthawks (1942)

  2 Bridges Review

  Nocturne

  Big Scream

  Portrait

  Land of Compassion (online)

  Some Irreparable Loss

  Big Scream

  The Big Bang

  Word(s) 77

  The Boulevardier’s Dawn / Cocktail Hour

  Home Planet News Online

  To Jumble

  2 Bridges Review

  Urban Homesteading

  Great American Poetry Show

  Vantage

  Home Planet News Online

  Vignettes

  Land of Compassion (online)

  Zum Zum

  Wild Violet (online)

  Twenty-Four-Dollar Real Estate

  Land of Compassion (online)

  Ferries

  Collection of the Ellis Island Museum

  Introduction

  With my husband of forty-eight years, it’s been a magic carpet ride.

  This book includes poems about New York by a native New Yorker. There have been Walt Whitman, Richard Wilbur, Djuna Barnes, Allen Ginsberg, Hettie Jones, and Marie Howe. But this New Yorker has played roulette in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. Manhattan looked more sublime, more diverse. Another time, I quick-talked my husband out of jail by the Black Sea c
oast, where the Roman poet Ovid was exiled. New York appeared more myriad in its wonders, contradictions. And we smuggled a pony-sized bottle of Chartreuse into Muammar Gaddafi’s dusty, dry Benghazi, Libya, to celebrate a wedding anniversary. Returning, New York City was replete with originalities, distinctions.

  While not all my travel has been to obscure and dangerous spots around the globe, this eventful life has given me such appreciation of New York.

  To follow, my lyrics on my city.

  Practicing One’s Craft

  Ocean liners and ferries, fire tugs and yachts—

  axiomatic: this town’s an island,

  ensconced on Sutton Place, watching

  a barge broach the East River,

  a denizen of Riverside Drive voyeuring

  a ketch upon the Hudson,

  a dweller in Battery Park City battening on

  a coast guard cutter patrolling

  New York Harbor.

  Sculls dip under the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge with

  a stroke of luck.

  Oysters again bed down in the reclaimed

  Hudson River.

  Water taxis, day liners, sightseeing boats,

  and sails commingle.

  Tankers ply the estuary with sloops

  and flippant Chris-Craft.

  Prolific progeny of Henry Hudson’s

  Half Moon and Giovanni da Verrazzano’s

  La Dauphine,

  or, as the RMS Queen Mary 2, when you’ve

  debuted in New York, you’re launched.

  Sardined on the subway, the city is

  a petrological,

  intimate isle, as if 1.6 million castaways

  weigh anchor, straphanger; Manhattan’s

  pond is not for small fry.

  Zum Zum

  The hot chocolate sipped at Schrafft’s,

  the nickel’s worth of mac and cheese

  at the Automat—

  the bygone watering holes that only linger

  in the adipose tissue.

  My working life coincided with the launch

  of a wurst purveyor with kraut or not

  and mustards, birch beer, and

  upon tap, hiel und dunkle.

  Found about Manhattan, one Zum Zum was

  niched in the concourse of the then

  Pan Am Building.

  A steady traffic of business types came

  to be served by dirndl-clad waitresses

  in the blond-wood setting on the

  appealing pewter plates and heavy

  glass mugs.

  Partake of the pungent crisp of the grilled wurst

  skins, the vinegar of the accompanying

  potato salad.

  Before the cell phone and the text message,

  patrons were seen doing the Times

  crossword puzzle while munching a

  baurenwurst or chatting a server while

  nibbling a brat.

  Zum Zum’s stacked decorative tuns of beer—

  this wasn’t a martini drinker’s hidey-hole—

  Gretchen or Liesl pulled a foamy, and it

  washed down the meal.

  Somehow, the freundlich was replaced by

  the power lunch or, at the opposite extreme,

  fast food.

  We saw the wurst, and it’s gotten worst.

  The Classical Age

  Almost slag, the sooty February remnants of city snow,

  anthracite mountain of the building’s compacted, bagged

  garbage.

  The upscale scavenger of our midden.

  Her belted trench coat, slouch-brim hat, aviator wrap

  sunglasses … only

  the accessorizing wheely grocery cart, clown smear of

  red lipstick,

  wristlet-length gloves on, she mines the pile for

  aluminum cans,

  anemic sunlight as the cart layers the varicolored logos

  of competing soft drinks.

  Dribbled embarrassment of detritus into the slush:

  apartment 7K’s ripped junk mail, somebody’s emptied

  fifth of Absolut, pizza crust with toothy dentation.

  And then a glimpse into the woman’s head beneath the

  slouch-brim; the filling cart elicits a rictus of

  painted smile

  In ancient Athens, the vote to expel from the city by

  casting bits of broken pottery, the ostraka, and

  hence our “ostracize.”

  Here, the supermarket calculates refundable nickels.

  Write as Rain

  The tropical steaminess of a late summer’s

  cloudburst,

  Manhattan as sauna,

  asphalt bubbly,

  humid, wilting …

  plonk;

  city street as caldera …

  plonk, plink.

  Tar pit of the construct mammoth.

  Sweltering,

  vaporous,

  the rubbery smack of tire track …

  splash, backsplash,

  slurred traction,

  aquaplane,

  skidsy.

  Step, splosh.

  Tempo of the City

  A near horizon whose sharp jags

  Cut brutally into a sky

  Of leaden heaviness, and crags

  —Amy Lowell, “New York at Night”

  A Manhattan moonrise hangs above

  the skyscrapered city

  like a snowball tossed by a perturbed Rip Van Winkle.

  Flakes stir and fall in the canyons of Wall Street,

  tickertape confetti—crystals as ephemeral as a stock tip.

  The storm-covered equestrian statue of the first president

  in Union Square is a horsey snowman.

  Pedestrians hunker down behind ski masks and cautiously

  navigate slick sidewalks.

  A traffic jam at a slush-soupy corner, and from a car’s window

  is heard the radio with the Village People’s “YMCA”;

  most passersby respond to the lyric’s up beat and are energized,

  some even smiling as they jump the corner’s icy pool:

  “Y-M-C-A.”

  Rhythmic weatherproofing.

  Mornings at Seven

  City blocks with donuteries, druggeries, and dry cleaners;

  air temperate, as if March had rinsed it,

  pounded it against the travertine on skyscrapers

  until it was like a favored pair of jeans.

  Urbanites unbundling, turtling out

  from wools and downs,

  the mind itself shedding torpor,

  senses keening, synapses firing.

  In the indestructible gingkoes along the avenue

  adjacent to the thrum of traffic,

  a plaint of sparrows, managing in this metropolis,

  the mate and nest mandate.

  Talismanic spring light, like Eurydice

  emerging from the underworld—

  in front of a florist,

  impervious to the capriciousness

  of the city’s seasons,

  flowering quince in a galvanized pail,

  all gossamer orange-pink and cinquefoil petals

  tempting a splurge,

  so for a fragile day an indoor garden,

  an unalloyed delight,

  amid the Barnes chairs, dhurries, and Dali lithographs.

  Nocturne

  When the sunset has squandered itself and

  the city’s sky deepens to what lyricists call

  indigo, />
  car lights flash on, weaving ribbon candy:

  headlamps peppermint,

  taillights disappearing cinnamon,

  homebound pedestrians footslogging.

  Neon’s luciferous

  crazy quilt of signage, billboards

  is intensified by gridlock;

  police/fire/ambulance, frenzied sound and light,

  taxis blinker on- and off-duty,

  vans spray-painted DayGlo.

  Passing buses filling lanes,

  commuters’ glazed stares at

  a window dresser’s fantasies.

  Intersections jammed, horns discord:

  flourishes of automotive

  cornets, flugelhorns, euphonium.

  The rampage exhausts eventually.

  Anticipate the moonrise,

  a flimsy disk (dish-faced moon) vying with the

  illuminated metropolitan night.

  The Bronze

  In the sunlight-flooded park where the nannies go,

  which overlooks a gentle bend of the East River,

  there is a sculpture of a monumental wild boar;

  upon his bronze haunch, and mild-miened,

  he oversees the prams and strollers,

  toddlers, and sturdy-gaited children

  out for the air and doing their first socializing,

  while the minders observe upon park benches

  the eddying river wide across to Queens,

  this enclave where ivied bricks screen the luxury high-risers.

  Then a boy of about four, with tousled blond hair,

  rushes to show his nanny something.

  It’s possible to make out their conversation is in Creole,