21 Stations
Times Square
I sit on the 7 train, penciling amoebas, mocking up
a print set called ‘Three Worlds.’ Sleepy Iowans
drift past parked cars at a Navy recruiting booth
under a spiral of stars, where three roads meet.
Today no car bombs nor happy carolers
from Les Miserables, no soldiers’ families here
to spread word of an end to fires in Najaf.
This is a fish lung of the city, Yoko Ono
is reminding us to hide till we forget--
nearby’s an Odditorium, The Lion King.
My daughter’s clocked out as an usher
at a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit and I smile
to remember our hike in the Judean Hills,
waiting for Moses and Aaron. Broadway’s
auctioning stuff: rifles, rice wine, rigatoni.
There’s an afterglow where Hamilton was
musket-balled by Burr, tugboats riverside,
sun rising over the Big Duck of Flanders,
with Shinnecocks out oystering North Sea.
I‘ll ride this entire subway line, beside me
in a car a Sri Lankan guy reads Nietzsche.
Bryant Park
Underground, dioramas of the Eocene accompany
a sea of wires, an Ethernet, panhandlers, where
I’m pushed along with commuters who ponder
thoughts of sleep. A lot of jobs are waiting
for those who see beyond the soggy tickertape.
Ovenbirds nest at the public library, where
under trellises of grape a trove of books
and manuscripts endures. Gilgamesh, Sappho,
Lyle the Crocodile and Go, Dog, Go! The Flowers
of St. Francis to speak to crows, a Red Book
Guide to Queens and every tale by Coetzee
cutting a swath of fury at an early brunch.
My lighthouse, my library of Alexandria,
I love you like a lamb, your labyrinths and
doors, your cabinets of curiosity on view!
It’s here I sleep away time’s tapping, near
Teepee Town once selling Hopi trinkets,
crowds mobbing automats, Mercy Ships
doling out party hats on New Year’s Eve.
As the train moves off towards Flushing,
I’ve got my book of maps on Archenland.
Grand Central
Battling traffic, Twitter, truth and joie de vivre,
I catalog cacophony as it scatters into dust,
like a rusty subway car in atriums of acorns,
an Internet of Things: a Seiko pocket watch,
a lilac necktie, an almanac, a cricket in a cage.
This is Grand Central, a tribute to Palladio,
Nick Cave, a parliament of fools, a teething
one-year old, a keeper of the rocks, a shy
commuter out of Rye who’s come too late.
On Platform 47, we hear Schubert fugues.
A barrette up track gives off a smell of lye.
Remember concourse backlit signboards?
Jungle landscapes and on the Plain of Jars
there are desiccated desert palms, mangos,
cottages under a Rio rainbow sunset. Now
I’m Mercury, slayer of Argos, god of traffic,
thieves, temptations, lost in a maze of foot
and hoof, straphangers queuing for a 7:42,
gawkers outside Bolivar Tobacco, ospreys
circling at the Daily News. A sudden lurch,
our local heaves into a river of forgetfulness.
Vernon - Jackson Avenues
Cars lurch up from Steinway Tunnel, screeching
to a halt at Café Henri, by sumacs at the mouth
of Newtown Creek, where feral cats in cubbies
dream of Annapurna fires along a lake. We pass
the carcass of a lorry full of peanut oil and piss,
oats, cargo rice on barges buffeted by a wind.
Oaxaca mariachis are strumming Cielito Lindo,
Uzbeks scatter flash cards and mutter oaths.
Lovers kiss in a pickup, dreaming of Baucis
and Philemon, a tale of metamorphosis, oak
and linden intertwined amidst a god’s rebuke.
Nature walks uncover petroglyphs, a theology
of sky, and tons of orange concentrate set by.
We watch dram boats hug the coast, a dolphin,
who’s lost her compass, makes her way upriver.
We stop for tea, a girl in frog boots doodling.
We see Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3 (Bright Lode Star),
a satellite spun from the Korean DMZ, where
Manchurian ibex lurk. Long Island City paper
wasps, a water tower boasting Save the Palestine.
As we pass by, the Pulaski drawbridge opens.
Hunters Point
We strap-hang in the fastest-growing borough,
Burnt Mill Hill, kettle ponds, Arbitration Rock.
Lost in our devices, our secret searches, we turn
the long curve of the 7 train as it veers past P.S. 1,
twin spires, an old charcuterie, a Czech beer hall,
stone cemeteries and a gurgling Sunswick Creek.
We peer at many-windowed Sunshine Biscuits,
Swingline Staples, a Breyer’s ice cream sign,
billboards collapsing into Sunnyside Yards.
We whiff the Tom Cat Bakery, the birth of
each loaf of rye, every hand-me-down cake
or nut croissant as a plan to end all hunger.
We spy the cantilever trusses of the bridge,
see hi-rise butterfly farms of 2030, eked out
of back-lot peas, with watercress, cabbage,
radishes, tomatoes, carrots, kale and kelp.
We watch the freighters Cherokee, Adriatic,
bound for seal pup slaughter in the Arctic.
We thirty pilgrims rally to ride the 7 train,
pass Five Pointz with its graffiti, with none
of the woes of Collect Pond across the river.
Court Square
At Court Square, we stop at artists’ studios,
one with paintings of Queens Street names:
Palermo Street, Farmers Boulevard, Utopia
Parkway, Linnaeus Place and Jagger Lane.
We pilgrims listen to bits of the 167 tongues
that are spoken here, ask for alms, excuse
lies, beg pardon, profess a lifelong passion.
We overhear an ancient dream, where a boy
goes hunting for Ice Age rocks, discovering
a granite outcrop at Twelfth and 43rd, where
a battered Mustang with no windshield rots.
By shoals where Mispat squaws would seine
for shad and sturgeon, I kayak Arbor Day,
keel over in river muck, squelch into bones
of my ancestor, Eliphalet Nott, a minister
who turned this shoreline into gold, sold
off lots to rum joints and caulk distributors.
Starfish creep by dockside carts of oranges:
at Court Square we pause to breathe, unsure
what a few Tokyo scribblers are up to, as we
jolt from one side of the world to the other.
Queensboro Plaza
Our Auckland ostler sucks on mineral water,
musing on death-by-fire and a Jet Blue sign.
Across a platform from our curious crowd,
a bride in a flowery dress takes photos for
her abuelo in Honduras, of family, factories
for horse-drawn carriages and fighter planes.
Beyond the bike lane, a field of yellow tulips,
the arc of a Q train bending towards Astoria.
A crawler excavates a pit for a Quality Inn,
parrots perch in pears near public housing
and hawkers mob the bridge before a storm.
Our crew sips beer, like logical philosophers,
thinking of islands on the moon, wondering
why big works won’t bring fame, till a train
arrives and we journey to the east, high heels
catching at concrete on the plaza. Fire engines
shriek. Our Catalan composer and Hollis cop
take turns nagging the urban archaeologist, as
he’s undercharged us for our five-hour tour.
We settle and head off towards Aviation High.
The air is thick with the smell of Turkish coffee.
33rd Street - Rawson Street
We descend the ornate, Roman viaduct, keyed
to traffic on the Boulevard of Death, a Harley
headed for Aqueduct and spewing gritty soot,
exhaust enough for a yearly carbon footprint.
We hear minor scales fluttering from a condo
window, where a child saws away at mazurkas
of Scriabin. At the high school, teens crank up
a Cessna Mescalero for a senior project. We fall
into single file past Sugar Land and a botanica,
to reach Connolly’s Dog & Duck, for a burger
and a black and tan before we stroll a bamboo
grove at Sunnyside Gardens, a utopia for bees.
An HVAC guy and his wife, a MOMA curator,
joke with the urban archaeologist (with a career
lying in ruins), as he jerry-rigs a staff, leads us
to blueberry bushes, locusts, trees-of-heaven.
We go to Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop co-op
known for lettuce, beets, its panoramic view.
On Skillman Avenue, magnolias are in bloom,
a World Banana truck is stalled, cups clinking
in a patio apartment that we may never enter.
40th Street - Lowery Street
We pass through a station without stopping, famous
for its weed walk, where burdock, spurge, mulberry
and lungwort are found in grass lots by McDonald’s,
where a pre-war wrestling arena stood when Ronnie,
our librarian, was seventeen, preparing for a prom.
Our attention is fixed inwards or on engineers
who plot a revolution in the city as a pinnacle
of everything. Shift workers in orange vests,
with drills for track repair in hand, dream of tar
on bridges in Duluth. Monks chat with a masseuse,
then questions come: on 9/11, where were you?
One was in the towers-- now an angel in heaven,
a mother glued to a phone, connected to nothing.
Our artist ran into flames as a wave of people
poured north, now she eyes people in our car
to gather sketches: a bodybuilder, a tennis team,
a prodigal daughter and a copyist without a job,
a host of weary passengers holding onto poles.
Mets fans chatter their way to a double header,
women read El Diario, China Press and Irish Echo.
We rush on haltingly towards foxes in Forest Park.
46th Street - Bliss Street
Our African actuary has never been to Woodside,
says that it feels like dormitory towns near Accra,
with textiles, plywood, processed foods or cocoa,
all but cricket fields, ant hills and Gold Coast Sea.
We walk the boardwalk to New Calvary, where
100,000 bodies were exhumed, ferried, re-buried,
making way for Gilded Age machine tools, trains,
steam pumps, robber barons and fresh arrivals.
Our vet says there are more dead than living:
can they talk, see shapes of our modern city?
We lunch at Triangle 54, a VFW shrine to all
the wars, to all our home and foreign sacrifice.
We pass turnstiles at Ruhe’s Wild Animal Farm,
what’s left of an exotic zoo, a vaccination stop
for imported animals, a crate stop for Barnum
and Bailey, for American circuses and zoos,
for pythons, rhinos, for Hashish the Camel
of Coney Island’s ‘Streets of Cairo’, tapirs,
a pyramid of Pomeranians, a talking crow.
We’re awed by the wonder, violence, greed
of this dear land we call our global village.
52nd Street - Lincoln Avenue
Merton says we must clamber up Difficulty Hill
to get to a city of God, to find rebirth in an oak--
where an opossum’s been stuck now for an hour,
a crowd gathered by an El train at Lincoln Avenue.
It’s a giant mouse, says a guy from Haiti, a tot takes
out his slingshot to try to coax the critter down.
Birders gaze at the gasping clump of fur, forget
they were pointing out orioles on a fire escape.
Traffic comes to standstill at this sight, lindens
damaged by icy winds, our troupe of pilgrims
ogling a bent Subaru under chain-sawed trunks.
Somebody says there’s a snake below a manhole,
maybe not Loch Ness monster, for sure a boa.
Benign neglect, wicked cold, mindless thinking:
we’re tired, we want to take a train at Roosevelt.
We sit in sphagnum moss and count out nickels
for the never-ending fare of Indonesian noodles,
Greek kebabs, Irish corned beef, Polish blintzes,
Delhi curry, Oaxaca tacos with lime and jalapeño.
We meet at 52nd Street to swap our travel notes,
an actor asks if we can visit the Queens Museum.
61st Street - Woodside
Planes fly low over this express subway stop,
look at the whites of the eyes of a stewardess,
buckled in for a landing at LaGuardia. And she
sees a prison bus on a bridge to Rikers Island,
a stack of coffins at an edge of a potter’s field.
Woodside Books opens its rolltop door, kids
picking out Nintendos for a ride to Montauk.
We get out and go down to Donovan’s pub,
steps from a chestnut tree, used for public
proclamations in the Revolutionary War.
Springs trickle runoff in what’s left of a
filled-in cabbage swamp, where a tow path
ran through apple orchards to a dance hall.
A copper beech stands by bygone trolleys,
Malays, Filipinos and Peruvians take pride
in backyard gardens for better days ahead.
The Fresh Pond plank road’s gone, it’s now
the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, limos
bumping along its pot-holed pavements.
We meet at Delgado Travel, head next to
Trains Meadow, the land of the rising sun.
69th Street - Fisk Avenue
We get off the train to see The Great Gatsby
on a nearby rooftop venue, just at sunset.
In 1930, a ride from Great Neck to the city
meant passing the Valley of the Ashes, its
piles of burning trash, like Dead Horse Bay
in Brooklyn, a dumpsite for retired mares.
We load back on at Fisk Street, notice a
Lenape in a beaver hat, in town to claim
the land that once was fisheries for trout.
Here, young Martha Peterson, African-
American, succumbed to smallpox, found
buried in an iron coffin. Farmworkers
from Quogue loiter at a deli, our video
salesguy tries to make a film about a ride
on the Third Avenue El before its end.
An express rolls by on flyover tracks,
locals shunting off to the Corona yards.
On a Thai café patio, we drink Beer
Lao with catfish and papaya, celebrate
our liberty to explore the boroughs, the
Lenape Indian still with us on the train.
74th Street - Broadway
In Jackson Heights, streets are full of cardamom,
pony-tailed twins are wildly playing Andean flutes.
We tape them and share it with Barbara’s brother
in Berlin, who, laughing, says he’s seen them mad
along Kurfurstendamm. Music travels over time,
in waves of loneliness or grief. I take our pilgrims
to the Chateau, where gardeners weed out violets.
We meet Teddy, a sixteen-year-old whippet, race-
track vet, whose eyes are glazed with utter joy.
Some of us try on saris, savor goat in Little India,
enter a shop where you can buy a house in La Paz
a dollar at a time. Farsi poets sit, discussing cosmic
wheels and crosswords. We sometimes take a bus
from here to Jamaica Bay to walk, talk, watch owls
and the projects in East New York. Eider ducks,
merlins, a coconut husk washed up on the shore.
This is station stop fourteen, our Via Dolorosa,
where you can watch a hundred soccer games.
At Roosevelt and 79th, we hold our ears, a dairy
truck backfires, cars honk, a train above us roars.
In Jackson Heights, discos have replaced the ponds.
82nd Street - Jackson Heights
We’ve lost members of our group to chest colds,
one with a colicky ten-month old with bluish eyes
like agate, but we press on to Junction Boulevard,
recounting walks in search of no one can say what,
from Fuji to Athos or Rumi’s tomb, Little Sparta,
Lourdes, making the Hajj to Mecca, Burning Man
or Walden Pond, to Our Lady of Guadalupe or
Thomas Jefferson. And why? We pilgrims think:
to learn, to shout, undo, reframe, enjoy or smile.
Hopkins says it’s a process of unselving, letting
ego go, listening to chaos, letting words flow.
I walk to St. Marks Church, where worshippers
intone “I thirst,” much like how I start a poem,
startle a feeling into the shape of ice or icebergs.
I stroll to Northern Boulevard, a carriage road,
to see a spire on downtown’s Freedom Tower.
I love to list the unnecessary things: fabulous
noses, cracked corn, slippery eels, oarfish gills,
elephant tusks, horse dung, hoary bats, cellar
doors, uninvited mice, you get my point if you
can read this, but I’ve lost my train of thought.
90th Street - Elmhurst Avenue
Known for Newtown apples, Elks Lodge, tea
shops, Geeta Temple, United Sherpa Church,
the neighborhood is what a Cuban sociologist
calls lower middle class, with aspirations bent
to bride price, bocce, bar mitzvah, dragon boats
and Holi, a Hindu festival of colors. Shanties
here were a housing blight that lives on today.
Once gas tanks here were seen from the LIE,
answering a child's eternal cry: Are We There Yet?
But now we’ve got urban zones, crowds, a shock
to William Levitt, the father of suburbia, whose
cookie-cutter Levittown transformed the nation.
Raccoons, starlings, occasional spiny porcupines
straddle a once-green belt between these worlds.
We search for the neighborhood of Lena Horne,
noticing the names that mask the trauma of
poverty and crime: Kew Gardens, Floral Park.
In East Elmhurst, Malcolm X lived with his girls,
a man in search of truth by trials of civil rights,
his house bombed in 1965, before he lost his life.
On a sidewalk, we see a man kneel at call to prayer.
Junction Boulevard
I drift into daydream as we leave Elmhurst,
channeling Neil Young on a Greendale tour,
my family sitting on a Foxboro hillside, we
three at once enjoying everything together.
Junction Boulevard reveals a sunken house
of worship, a Lares deli, ‘hood hoops, lilies.
We amble past a Tiffany’s furnace works
where tea sets mimic a Roman Syrian glass
of gold, turquoise blue. Outside a Salumeria,
we hear steel drum calypso at set-back family
homes forgotten by a string of mayors. Train-
spotters come: Lucien, who’s ten, enumerates
train car types in Redbird Reef, an archipelago
in Slaughter Bay, in Delaware, where 7 trains
go down to die with tanks, barges and a ton
of Firestone tires, its green waters home
to barnacles, horseshoe crabs and squid.
We meet Olivia who’s writing of carusi boys
who toiled in sulfur mines in Agrigento:
our herpetologist is moved, says he’ll tune
up his search for the chorus frog of Queens.
for Dorothy Schmiderer Baker
103rd Street - Corona
Blocks to Lemon Ice King and Flushing Meadow
Park, Brazilian Adventists, Our Lady of Sorrows,
Louis Armstrong lived on 107th Street, but played
in Storyville, San Francisco, Quebec, Cameroon
and Congo. His smile, his style, his big heart
and gravelly voice put joy into jazz. He charmed
children on his stoop, as well as Marilyn and JFK
and the King of Thailand (on the sax).
‘Meet Me in Paris’ floods from a bedroom,
a turntable spins his song of beans and rice.
We sit in a garden as honeysuckle blooms,
robins timing their worms to his melodies,
all of us taken by the cheery lilt, as ghosts
of Ellington, Ella usher in. I close my eyes
and hear his ‘Melancholy Blues’ as it soars
into space with the Voyager space probe,
together with Bach, bagpipes, shakuhachi,
gamelan, as well as dog barks, code taps,
photos of Pluto, pictures of nursing mothers,
a spiral diagram of dancing sperm and ovum.
Reeling off into ether, 100 million miles away,
it’s Satchmo’s blues that help us journey on.
111th Street
Bjork’s busy conducting humpback whales
at the Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows,
where rockets languish, no more blasting
to outer space to mine crater dust on Mars.
I take a photo of my niece, the Unisphere
as backdrop, her thoughts very far away.
A trylon and a perisphere stood here for
the World’s Fair, a testament to engineers
who rebuilt factories from the inside out.
Superman flew in and Coolidge’s hippo
Billy came, as well as Elektro, a talking,
smoking robot, a merry-go-round for
milking cows, a time capsule for 6939.
Here the U.N. met to partition the Holy
Land, hoping for the grace of Solomon.
I love Guston’s WPA fresco, signaling
a return to public works, a community
understanding, a theme for the next fair
my family visited when I was six. There
were Belgian waffles, Sinclair’s dinosaur,
a gloom in the car foreshadowing a divorce.
Mets - Willets Point
The thirteen blocks between Citifield and the river
have no sidewalks, sewers, but lots of palsied dogs
who are yelping at the moon. Chop shops, car
parts, iron works in a triangle of puddle muck,
a Third World just minutes from the city’s heart.
Sex shops, pimps, deadbeat dads who skip bail.
Two machinists, Rudi and Zizek, pound hubcaps
into useful life. Junkies sleep. The single resident,
a Joseph Ardizzone, like Timon of Athens curses
his enemies as he doesn’t want to move, to make
way for more House of Spices stores or shopping
courts that call to mind a Mall of Emirates, with
Ski Dubai, fountains of fireworks, a petting zoo.
Maybe a stadium for Maradona? A pushcart rolls
off a corrugated roof past barrels burning trash.
Urine pools near yellowlegs wading in the creek.
This is the urban Land of Oddiyana. We don’t
get off, we stay true to our goal of Main Street.
A man gestures out at cirrus clouds beyond what
once were peonies for as far as the eye could see,
still a good spot to detail your Lincoln Continental.
Flushing - Main Street
We’ve reached the end, we don’t know where to go.
I thank our guide, search out the Weeping Beech,
beehives in the Botanical Garden, a Paris bakery,
and Biang!, a Xi’an noodle shop where we hear
thieves’ tales Mao loved in All Men Are Brothers,
in the land of Lao-tse, in dynasties of hundred-
year-old eggs near sprouting factory towns like
Sock City, Underwear Village, Necktie Bend.
Roads lead to the Remonstrance, a Quaker plea
to Peter Stuyvesant to allow their silent worship.
We sip tea at an Afghan eatery, where we meet
our final penitent, a vet just returned from war.
She recalls a memory of vanishing, and happy
kids, rolling metal hoops and skipping stones
off a pontoon bridge on the Kabul River. I sit
by the Amadeus Music School, a bus stop for
the Bronx, and ‘7 Train Tattoo,’ musing on
how we survived the Toba human bottleneck
or end up chasing bats in Flushing, as I put
a bristle of oil enamel to a painted sign, just
as I place a period to punctuate this final word.
for Arthur Smith, 1913-1999
22 Stations (Coda to 21 Stations)
I'm sitting in Brooklyn's Shakespeare Garden,
listening to a Chinese erhu. Far from Queens,
I wonder how to adjust my 21-line poems
of the stations of the 7 train, to a 22nd stop
just built at Hudson Yards, sprouting out of
tunnels for the poor like mushroom spores
and native plants up on the High Line. But
it’s Toshiko Mori's teardrop bud that’s burst
from elevated tracks where my friend from
Budapest and I would roam our West Side
piers, eating blinis at the Cheyenne Diner.
We combed the streets for hand-me-downs
and walked for miles as there was no train.
The subway stop, built for 2012 Olympics
that never came to be, is a go-to in itself.
It’s raining here, and in a park downtown
in Saint-Denis, Réunion, where another
friend is introducing a bill on climate
change to government. It’s also pouring
at the 34th-Hudson Yards station, across
the bay, end of the line for our tomorrows.
Notes
Bannister’s Landscapes
Edward Mitchell Bannister was among the earliest Rhode Island landscape painters, the first African American artist to win national recognition, and a founding member of the Providence Art Club. His landscapes showed the influence of the Barbizon style, an awareness of the Hudson River School, and the developing Impressionist movement.
His work was steeped in a Romantic spirit and an emotional response to nature. Bannister’s words provide a link between his private vision and the streets of bustling Providence, the Art Club, and the soon-to-be Pen and Pencil Club. They provide a gloss on his bucolic scenes of harmony and quiet. Bannister was not a wordsmith, but he was an active member of Providence public life as well as an accomplished and well-known painter.
The titles of his landscapes create a simple and beautiful narrative that underscores a need to ‘capture’ the disappearing agrarian life of Southern New England but also recognize the growth of cities and industry. For the booming mills that changed the face of 19th century life throbbed just upriver from his favorite ponds and pastures.
The Largest Glue Factory in the World
This series of poems looks at the smells, sights, sounds of mid-nineteenth century America, in New York (around Newtown Creek, Brooklyn) partially through the eyes of Peter Cooper, at once inventor, abolitionist and candidate for the U.S. Presidency, pre-Gilded Age self-made man, railroad, steel, and manufactory entrepreneur and social reformer interested in the rights of working men and women, but also a grand polluter of the New York waterways.
The 14-line, 14 poems use a loose sonnet form, and echo the Persian ghazal (using the name of a persona within the poem), with an emphasis on the smelly things we pass by every day, living in the city.
21 Stations
’21 Stations’ evokes lives and music and history along the 21 stations of the 7 train, the 167 languages spoken there, journeying EAST out of the city. The poem is inspired by Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. This piece formally was a set of 21, 21-line poems, which I call sonnets-and-a-half. It is about the patchwork quilt of culture across Queens as seen in the river of commerce, reflection, and imagination of the 7 train.
It features a meditation by Mercury, the god of travel, thieves, temptation, and toy trucks, including two World’s Fairs (red trolley cars now coral reefs for fish and squid in Delaware), shadows of Louis Armstrong, Malcolm X, and porcupines and ibises from Levittown to Aviation High School, to cobbled lanes for Farsi poets, Italian shoemakers, and temple elders from Tibet.
The poem goes on to reflect on Korean car parts men, chop shops, intellectuals, mad urban planners, the history of the demise of the American farmyard (and our Native American heritage), retooled lives, abuelas from Honduras, lawyers from Indonesia, drummers from Bangladesh, Columbian hairdressers, mobsters, and drag queens, Nepalese shamans, rooftop kale farmers, baby carriage pushing Dads and golf-course gardeners.
Thirty pilgrims set out from Times Square to wend their ways to the Weeping Beech in Chinatown, in Flushing, where bats can still be seen in belfries. Over the course of writing this series, they added a station at Hudson Yards, making it the uneven ’22.’ My ‘Coda (21 Stations)’ addresses this.