Afterward

I awoke in the slag of becoming awake.

Each day was a knife that cut open the eye.

The sunlight mangled and gashed each mistake;

The clouds were gnarled corpses, flaying and flying— 

Whenever I remembered or tremor’d to breathe,

I thought I had erred by being alive.

The mind would relive love it couldn’t relieve:

What, without any ending, could really survive?  

There were the fictions of the luminous night

Where I nestled under the shivering cover

Of sleep—and then, there were the brighter 

Fictions where I had been erased into another

Light, in which I had once wanted nothing  

More than to see a face answer mine with a kiss,

And believe the certainty that that moment brings,

Beyond the dark unforgiving I wished to resist.

O, lost one, I wander through oblivion’s knowledge,

Which is not forgetting but what has been forgotten:

Where all the streets have been mirrored with snow,

And ice insinuates itself into the smallest fault-

Lines of stones, to expand them and explode

Their hard truths; where wind polishes them smooth;

The whole circuit of seasons makes them erode,

And there is no proof for anything that could soothe.

frank giampietro

Oogling Around

I.  Mornings in Midtown

Sunlight ricochets off the peacock’s tail

Atop the Chrysler Building; potholes brim

With key-lime sludge and antifreeze; orange

Oxide flares where rust-flakes from a fire

Escape’s zigzags crossfire in the blowback

From an accordion bus puffing past the dust-

Bowl of Madison Square, where the slatternly

Gray of a swoop of pigeons’ wings boomerang

Into shamrock/amethyst—clouds dishabille a sky

As turquoise as a bag from Tiffany’s: Dayglo 

Vivified with Midtown car exhaust, intensified

Where chock-a-block shop windows photocopy

Each other with commodities oversaturated with

Superimpositions, just as all are assumed in a traffic

Of resumes and mannerisms, mesmerisms of raw

Ambition—junk- & fastfood, dim sum, sopapillas, sushi;

We spew and rove, heirs to stroll the whole farrago

Of the metropolis through the deluge of our collective

Residua, along the false dawn of Lower Broadway

Where my friend Frank once said, “this birdshit is

Pollocking the sidewalks,” or lost among a slew

Of slim Chelsea boys in Dri-fit form-hugging

Tracksuits racing the Hudson’s dizzy circumflex,

Sweating off their previous night’s reckless excess:

Is this the gaudy wash of a dazzling electric-grid

Illuminating what each heart longs to transcend to?

—Not that buildings should be made to fit

Some static, prefab notion of human scale,

But that our minds naturally begin to fill

Whatever nature is; whatever space has been

Renovated by being dwelled in or on long enough

Until, between the psychological makeshift that is

Architecture and the busier and bittersweet dis-

Locations of desire, immoderate grief’s hi-

Jinks skyrocket us into the stratosphere of a new real

Estate—here, at the hysterical liquidation of Times

Square, an omphalos bustling with scrolls and arcs,

Taxi-regattas, sixty-foot lingerie ads, ad-busting stock-

Market tickertapes—dull pigeons bursting into doves;

Buildings raptured past their fractioned idiom,

Every fractured idiosyncrasy of stasis: sound-

Bites and media-buzz beedance around a median’s

Billboards, crazed with a flock of Japanese tourists

Who try to snap it up with digital cameras shuttersped

To overexpose the lightspeed of the converging

Avenues, while in their midst I shudder to think

How much the rent must be in Nagasaki or Tokyo.

II. Bryant Park

Gertrude’s squat statue poses Buddha-like,

An impasto of brazen birdlime puckering

Her brow into a ball while she meditates

On her famous mantra: “a rose is a rose is a”—

From which, if spoken repeatedly, will arise

A hurried mumble of—eros-eros-eros . . .

She’s on the library-side of this park, a potter’s

Field-cum-paradise amid the urban sprawl, named

For a different poet whose bronze sits cross-

Wise from her as she continues to look as obtuse

And methodical as her abstruse, mathematical

Prose.  The trampled grass molders brown-goldenly,

Blazing ebulliently from patient years of miracle-

Grow.  An ankle-high rope barrier slumps around

The perimeter.  Late April sunlight fecundates

Inactive fountains usurped by melted snow and

Algae.  Pigeons bob and strut through the discom-

Bobulated stet of lawn; a toddler tries to straddle his

Wobbly leg over a wooden horse at a defunct carousel;

His fifth-grade brother gazes down, flop-mouthed,

At his sneakers’ swoosh squished by a doublescoop of

Pistachio ice cream dribbling past two Pétanque boules.

Archipelagoes of wrought-iron chairs curve in long,

Elliptical clusters around the edges where the park

Gets most peopled; a few book stalls betray the news-

Paper readers’ glum facticity with their fictive motives:

Here, mockingbirds imitate the calls of Blackberries

And cell phones.  Stockjobbers, jockeying for a hot

Tip, horseplay with each other amid the stiff competition

Of gawking at off-duty fashion models sashaying by,

Some offering cat-calls to those for whom all the world’s

A catwalk.  At the lavish withdrawal of sunlight, the city

Block is immersed in a deep well of liquescent shadows

Draped by the surrounding hotels and office buildings.

On a bench, a teenage couple bickers with their hands

Lepidopterously fluttering.  Across 6th Ave., the clipped

Shuffle of businessmen hurry past the bright orange suits

Of sanitation workers huddled round steaming sewage lines,

And speed away under the blip-illegible sign of the national debt,

Out beyond the shade’s stark upward sweep from the Grace Building.

III. Broken Land

Breeze rummages the picnic fields, having a bone
to pick—revolves in curlicues of encrypted refuse:

plastic dishware leftover from barbequed spare ribs,
one lone jigsaw puzzle piece, the ribbing of a Wonder

Bra, crumpled juice cartons, an overlooked spongy foot-

ball, and stray wet scraps of leaves

Each stretch of landskip, a pleasure moiling memory’s open

wound.  Dragon-kites in the long view across Long Meadow

trace the wind’s least visible intent—faint above old men

who metal-detect for loose change, dig a bit, then podder on,

boned up on the difference between a wheatback and buffaloed.

The story of every yesterday has been the elongation

of the tension it elides; pink-grey fuzz of spry little blossoms

nipple-up; the weather quickens with the storm-quick cumuli.

Branches totter in the lofty conceptions that skirt away into mis-

placed apprehensions and soggy April’s mulch where dank,

nameless junk toggles with the prospect of becoming

either decaying ground or ether, litter barely litter, fecund

in the fecal sludge that germinates to willow and yellow daffodils.

Trotting out of Prospect Park, beyond the wrought-iron garden gate,

past the bike messengers and strollers, the stalled-out clock-tower

on Flatbush Avenue can be seen forever folding its hands in prayer, 

which resembles a one-off boner instead of “the very prick

of noon.”  I look under—am taken by a graffito’d construction

sign: “Insert Text Here” where the city’s failed to break

ground for years.  The joints’ sharp ache before it rains, made heavy

with the supersaturated air, unspools the brittle fates that swoon

a thought nearly into wing: my mind keeps chattering where my eye

roves, these streets that seem the worn grooves of my own palm, a fate

not indistinct from the language’s echoed I I can no longer think

to be without. 

the light itself begins to take away; a myth-kitty’s litterbox, I amble

to the promissory headland of the Heights, to be greeted by

an ambuscade of faces bubbled in a shock of blear: the Promenade’s

raw slurry, a kind of waterfall of human figures: the moment, swift,

exacting what it is, arrested in a glance, or in its surreptitious

wink—a skyline over-awed with the chill, demonstrative

absence of a wind that loiters out, not even worth remarking on,

alone among the scuffled crowd at dusk, now summoned into daze.

I walk around and peel my orange and blink.