New York

From: "The Parade of Volumes,"
A work included in Shuteye Town, 1999


The buildings fell and fell and fell, with a noise like thunder underground...

IX.

     There are tears here now. In the wake of Fairweather’s passing there are tears. For Fairweather? It is not clear. Salt water glazes vision, a blurred rainbow grief distorts the figures crouched, prone, pacing, kneeling on the platform. Colors thought gone forever have reemerged in the corners of wet eyes. Swords gleam, unreflecting, an internal illusory fire. Faces lose their lines, though wet lines score them, dampen dust-stained cloaks drawn tight around hunched shoulders. Movement is a breaking of the spectrum: Jake a prism pacing, all sharp edges and hard surfaces bouncing wounded light about him; Colin a palette propped against the wall, a haphazard smear of pink and gold, muddy reds, sea blues threaded with green tendrils.
     Tears are being shed. For whom? Heads turn sharply, flattening colors. Heads turn inside a speeding cylinder, a carousel of dancing colors.

X.

     Above, it is quiet. The last stone of the last building has fallen. Lichen swarms over the rubble like a net of camouflage softening the broke bone edges of the ruins. There is no sunlight to glance off splinters of glass or otherwise betray the buried polish of annihilated craftsmanship. Only a rilled, gray-green landscape remains in sight.
     But underneath, artifacts also remain. The second rise at left was the library. Its columns are still there, askew, overlapping like a forgotten throw of pickup sticks, with Madame Sapinaire among them. She lies crushed where Fairweather hurled her even as he rescued Colin from her embrace. The peonies are black, curled and dry, her face obliterated by a cylinder of granite, her legs poking, also askew, from the hem of a rent, powdered dress, her final song trapped with her corpse under a tent of vegetation. All is in darkness. The song drifts and swirls and echoes silently in place.
     The depression at middle distance right was Hartley Square, which once abutted the library and the Cathedral of Saints. Lichen adheres to the flat stones, forming a smooth and kelpy sea. No more signs of kneeling, marching, dancing. The hymns are gone. But the pine knots are still piled there where they were used for bonfire at procession’s end.
Olympia Park is the mountain range on the horizon. The trees never fell, though lichen smothered them. Underneath, the grass is brown and flat. Yet signs remain: bootmarks still pock the soft hidden earth where Jake screamed for war after the churches fell. The half moons of his heels spell out his polemic. And rows of round full moons are where the legions knelt, absorbing his rage.
     And elsewhere there are pennons and fading flowers and sword-scarred subway kiosks and hacked-up limousines and broken ceremonial blades and dirty velvet cloaks and blood. And the lichen stinks over them, and the city lies underneath, destroyed and buried and yet there.

XII.

     Once there was, there was once, a Parade of Volumes, and I am almost sure I saw you there among the cheering and the living crowds. In darkness now, I seem to recall the special brightness of that day, the splendor of the long procession, the shine of your new eyes as you watched from your father’s shoulders. What has become of him, my child?   Does he lie with the others, soft rubble of our broken dream?
     You were too young. Who will now remember that Jake and Colin rode together then, twin lords who shared one throne and wove the city’s thousand thousand rhythms into one. Too young. All you saw was color, felt the brilliance of our city’s sun, feared the cadences of marching men, step by step together... Alas, you were too young...
     Once, there was a Parade of Volumes. Where it started... Where it led... How it sang and shimmered... Gone now, gone, and gone, like all of us and you and you who watched and went away...
     There was once, must one day be, a Parade of Volumes, bright dance of glory in old new eyes. Farewell my child, my murdered embryo, my blank and stolen monument and loss...