Tom Sleigh On First Avenue and Sixth Street

There are days the whole world gets down on all fours;
if you’re twenty or sixty, you’d do it in an alley,
            bodies thrown together –
and when it’s over, one or both of you stumbling
            out into afternoon, ghosting
                        through air it goes
                                    on and on...
The absence that starts to shine on Atlantic Avenue,
                        the crazy drive-by
    joy that turns the speakers so loud the car
            vibrates now becomes years later
a story you tell your child who grows up to be a Veejay
                        in a dance club
            over in Williamsburg.
The East River where you used to walk in Carl Schurz Park
                        looks like it drags
into the current’s weave the Domino Sugar Factory,
silo architecture on fire in the oily spangle
that joins the Hudson upstream at Spuyten Duyvil.

            The world gets down on all fours
                                    and that’s you
yelling your head off as a boy, pounding your mitt,
    the grass not quite grown-in because it’s April
and the odors wafting up are dogshit and leafrot,
                        spunk buried in winter muck
                        releasing head clearing
effluvium, sky overarcing the batting cage
    and chainlink backstop, home plate’s white diamond
making a satisfying thump womp when you pound
    your bat three times as you step up to the plate:
                        out there in the river
    a pirate was flung from the yardarm,
            and that’s where the giant ape
    clung, beating his chest bloodied by machine guns
            of the gnat-sized Curtiss Helldivers
                        his giant, seamed hand
                        bats from the sky.
Or the mushroom blast looms up in the boxed-in screen
            and radiation transmogrifies
                        crabs become the size
    of boxcars that charge you from their cave
            where they discuss your fate
    in the voices of mad scientists
                        they’ve just eaten.

            This is the day when the world
gets down on all fours, and you and she lie out on the city beach,
    sun dazzle in the shallows, tinflash on the far swell
            as the thieving Parking Meter Czar
                        slashes his wrists
            upstairs while talking to his shrink,
                        his wife listening in
too late on the extension downstairs... for the wife
                                    a tragedy,
            but for the two of you chuckling
                                    at the headline,
                        Corrupt Meter Man Expires,
                                    weren’t you happier
back then, tuned in to radio waves beamed out across the universe,
                        the song’s last word reversed
the first word alien ears would hear, whole lotta love
                        evol attol elohw
the radio bubble widening 100 light years through space
            broadcasting Led Zeppelin, Cream, Zappa’s
                        ‘Weasels Rip My Flesh’
    inspiring your own vodka-fueled arias
            never heard in the high clamshell hall
            listening to the woman without
                                    a shadow
    sing to the unborn children singing
in the frying pan their lovely sorrow at not being born:
            don’t let yourself be turned
                                    to stone
    like the Emperor who can only be saved
            if his wife, Empress of the Spirits,
                        gets down on all fours
and finds a human woman who will sell to her her shadow:
                                    the composer
    said this opera was his ‘Child of woe’,
            and you yourself staring down
    like the giant ape, surprised to find your hand
            empty, beast to her beauty,
                        are swaying, falling
            through skyscraper horizons
                        to a woman’s voice
    singing you to sleep half a century ago
where you’re floating downstream among bulrushes and cattails
            toward your rendezvous with Pharaoh’s
                        daughter who fades
    into the Domino Sugar Factory’s glow
                                    as sun
                        tangled in bridge cables
    portions out currents quarreling into zones
                        blazing up like gas flames
on the little gas stove in your walkup on First Avenue
above the Ukrainian beauty parlor where you first felt
the world getting down on all fours and you followed along
            in your dog’s instinct for pleasure –
                        it seemed like it would last
forever, didn’t it, her reading out from the paper
            and the two of you laughing together
                                    until you both
    lost your shadows and were condemned to walk
among the spirits who cry out to you like cats wawling
    in the weed-clumped frozen garden down below.

Now, the Empress and Emperor sing their final duet
            in praise of the unborn, drowning out
                        the cats as the river
                                    brims over,
            reflecting the schooner Tiger
shooting flames from topmast to bowsprit,
                        the hull listing,
            sinking into its own smoking
                        hiss and onrush
                                    of waters
            buried under fill buried under
                        the fallen tower
never dreamed of by the Empress or Emperor
            who sing not to vaporized wisps
                                    of DNA
but to spirits crowding into starry vestibules.

And there you are with your crew, wintering over
            as you build the Restless
    and in the first spring wind launch her through
            Hell Gate into the great bay
                        beyond, sailing up
            as far as the River of Red Hills
before crossing the wide ocean to your house in Old Wall Street
    you and your wife called The Two Hooded Crows
            and where you lie down in your bed
alone because she died while you were at sea, and you only
    found out the moment you came ashore –
                                    and that first night
    after twenty-five years together, you dream
                        of furred beasts slinking
                        through your campsite,
    your human smell fading into musk and scat.



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