“Only time can stop time…” I think, beneath the guise of rich green treetop canopies softened and sweetened by recent rain. A long needle nosed tower stands above the brick and green lined horizon like a flag pole to a bygone era. I sit and wait for a bus on Massachusetts Avenue watching cars and people and Robins go by. Most notably, the robin whose brushed brown red and orange belly was a perfect sphere under its grey and black streak of a body as it swooped across the scene crying out, “Me! Don’t forget about me!” Only time can stop time. Only time can interject itself into your life at moments when it so chooses. “Take a look at me,” it says like a grandfather clock in the hall every hour. “Look over here.” glares the neon green from your desktop shelf the night we stayed up till dawn talking about our stuff. “Come on,” cajoles your conscience as you know this is wrong but you know it will be over soon so get on with it already. Time. Slows down to a hilt always at your side. Ready to fly away at times delightful and stay, steady and slow, during those times quite painful. It’s an amazing thing that only purveys the forefront of your thought how it wants, and whenever it wants as well.
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Swallows on a Sunday Afternoon
I found this in an old book of mine.
I had written it one morning while in DC .
The swallows overtake the sky
Like bees out of the hive,
flying this way and that
among puff-white mine fields
that hang quietly in the blue,
they swoop and flutter like fighter pilots
on a friendly flying mission.
“I wonder if somebody died,” I say aloud
as I watch a yellow monarch flutter past my window.
The two emergency vehicles were cause enough for concern.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I think to myself,
“that somebody dies on a clear and sunny Sunday afternoon.”
Mandla Reuter. Lines on The Gate.
Caught between you and your memory
And now caught on the other side
of what once was a threshold
you slip now from seen and unseen,
in and out of focus,
here and then not.
Like the long heavy closed eyed yawn,
now here and now gone.
You, always there,
never coming or going,
standing still but separate
the both of you
not facing each other
not wanting to connect any longer.
You, old and new,
Did you one night,
with Lorca’s dying Orange Tree,
cut the shade you used to cast?
No more in life if no more with her?
Is that the end you choose for you?
To welcome interruptions
but never anyone home,
To welcome interruptions
but never anyone home?
There you stand ready and waiting,
and yet I walk through you
and through you, and through you.
——————–
Grown apart
older now
both have bled
both are rusty,
one seems closed off.
One seems empty.
Both led home,
Now they stand apart like
grandparents
but not quite
themselves.
Mozart and the MTA
Something in the truth stirs the sound receptor in my mind and I only hear the sound of mumbled marbles through choking mouths — like when I rushed to my Harlem bedroom window after hearing a plane passing really low, hand to mouth, rushed and stood pressed to glass — I could only hear the rumble of plane and whir of my imagination. And this only a month ago. I suppose it was nothing. Or at least no one ever heard about it. So whether violins or groans from underground brought me there it was something about the truth that stirred in me on this train headed to lots of places.
But now all I hear is the “routine” from a man in the subway. He parked himself in the middle of this uptown 4 and immediately took to two children on the laps of their parents. Now those kids are gone, scared off at Bowling Green with its orange painted brick stretch of walls, but the man continues, he’s moved up and down the train after apologizing for interrupting the day, the passage, the read, the concert etc. and has proceeded to entertain the train with imitation train noises for starters… This was actually met with delightful curiosity by the sister in a pair of children, whose haircuts were almost the same save a distinguishable few curls that sort of went through her head precociously, making her a cute but muppet-looking little rascal. And as the doors closed they “chimed” together, the man and the kid, and the ultimate showman exclaims proudly but still in his gruff tone, “she’s my partner, ladies and gentlemen. One more time…” and she never repeated the sound. Even I entertained the notion to help the faltering show. But he was fine, he was obviously some sort of falsetto genius and man about town — the underground town. Now he’s on to jokes and has quite a few people laughing or at least smiling. Even me through my Mozart, through it all.
I enjoy listening to Mozart underground because it seems to add a sense of driven purpose or at least justification for things I’ve seen down here. I like when the tender lush swells match a starting train before it catches hold of higher speeds. And twinkling piano trills ringing against the sea of squeals and even now the train runs smooth and these strings rage onward through the dark layered forest. The soot is a stream of midnight water and we go forth into the nothingness until the mechanics gives way to the logistics and the MTA fails Mozart. But here again the flight of keys black and white, up and down, a confluence of birds like people, perched or running, never flying. Reaching stretching all within Mozart’s grasp, it’s all within my grasp until even Mozart has to stop. And the steady mechanics of the track click track click track click takes hold of my heart and steadies the chaos once more.
But whether it be truth or chaos. The subway and Mozart are great antidotes.
Games lost, by the Philosopher Fisherman
“most games are lost, not won.”
So I immediately approached the truck and a man dressed like a fisherman greeted me with a smile and open palm. “How are you?” I said quite jovially as if I’d known him for years. “Good, good,” he responds and then I look over to the water where he sits, see he sort of presides over this little tugboat being rained upon by clear blood looking water from the shower hose rigged above. He was a carney.
And so we chatted about things here and there near and far, for just a few moments, as the rest of the bus, the very happy yellow school bus from the outside, but whose innards seemed strangely unimpressed by their surroundings, almost unhappy.
But on they walked and there I stood about to play a carnival game. For free. For the mere enjoyment.
The tugboat’s top stood out like Abraham Lincoln’s black stack high above a basin not so proud and long as his face; the boat was short and stout, like a kettle out the oven that’s been flattened near a crepe. A filled one.
And so I readied myself, like a golfer or a weightlifter, grounding myself and trying to counter balance with my one shoulder messenger bag to get the best throwing stance possible to try and get these rings around the tugboat’s top. And one: whew, right over the top. “At least I got it close,” I thought for a quick second before I shifted my weight back and forth. And I grabbed the second ring, this one bright orange. Clang! –“Woah!” from the fisherman, kindly and warm — “Nice,” I thought but just for a second, and I was readying my feet again. As I lifted the third ring I thought of nothing else but the ring and the tugboat. Getting the ring to the tugboat.
And I lost. I hit it again though, but it seemed merely a consolation prize, getting to knock it twice but never landing it through. “No matter,” I thought and smiled at the kindly artist, as we chatted some more. He was in fact an artist as was the designer of this entire game who was working the ski ball around the back of the truck. Joel Kyack.
I could’ve won a mirror painted by him. If I had only won that tugboat toss. And I shook the fisherman’s hand and was greeted around the corner by another man who was dressed in a yellow rubber rain suit complete with heavy duty suspenders. A fisherman.
After getting to see some of his other work in the Frieze Art Festival, I could tell he was certainly a fisher of men. Philosopher Fisherman.
On the way to Atlantic
You were coming from work and as you left the train at Atlantic my eyes warmed over like yours had been warmed over, swelling to an innocuous jade and brown beneath the phosphorescence. I was crying your tears and the doors closed and I looked down to let them fall and instead of cold release, you came through me and it was like putting glasses on for the first time. Everything was washed clean, like a windshield wiper or a dish being pulled out of fresh cold water in one of those commercials but no dripping at all, and my face remained dry; it all soaked into me.
You were crying the minute I stepped into the train no doubt, because when I reached my seat across from you, you were wiping your eyes already.
It took me the entire ride to gather the courage to talk to you, and actually it was you who spoke first. Coming over to the map behind me you peered through your big eyes that shined a sad glaze, and you stepped back still unsure. I said, “what are you looking for?” at which you replied, “does this stop at Atlantic?”
After our exchange and my double checking the map, for I had just moved to a neighborhood along this line myself, the train was indeed headed to Atlantic. To make matters better, God chimed in and announced as the conductor, “Stand clear. Next stop Atlantic.” We laughed and I came over next to you. “Are you alright?” “Oh, I’m fine,” you started and I continued, “because I saw you crying before and –” “well, yes…” and then we breathed. I felt berated, for the blink of an eye, about my brazen observance. “It’s been a long day,” you offered and I sort of sigh an exhalation. “I’m sorry” I seem to say, “uhhmmphh” I kind of mumble through a closed mouth “I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“I know what you mean,” I would’ve said, but I simply say “yeah…” and offer you my handkerchief which has been idly in my grasp for a few minutes now, since I had been back over on my side. Since I wanted to help, but could only look over and wonder. I did, while I was over on my side, ask God to “give me her pain.” I’m not sure why but I do that from time to time.
You sort of laugh and entertains my offer with a generous wave and air of aristocracy and I smile too at the thought of having a handkerchief nowadays. You smile through pressed lips and I do too.
Now the same handkerchief is in my hand again beneath my phone as I type this. Anchors and rope, blue and red coil. And in a wide cross-check pattern the rope goes through and through the white handkerchief lined in navy blue and thin lines of red. We’re coming up from 14th street and I wonder about you. I wonder if you have stopped crying? Or if you’re having dinner yet?
I hope you’re doing well. And yet I can’t help but think, “I wish I could’ve done more.”
April Showers bring May Flowers
Until this May rain had confined me for a bit, held me at bay from the world and pinned me to the wall of self awareness I couldn’t see winter’s end. I couldn’t see you as never there. But now I sit alone on the sofa aside from new lives and new attitudes, having breakfast at noon and typing this into my phone…
Art to be made and songs to be played. New songs and old songs and perhaps just a few songs I haven’t heard before, from desktops and bus stops and rooftops and blacktops that all cry out confined in droplets of rhythm in time dropping and splashing in their own meter and rhyme, chiming together with the tune of passing shuttles and planes plowing through pillows of thick cotton complexions, resounding through my window like passing strangers in the night that seem very recognizable. Where are the birds I heard a few days ago? Now my heart is friend of the jackhammers, like when I was a kid on the playground — hanging out with the class clown cut-ups before they could gang up on me, I was their mascot — so too my heart takes solace in the streaming plane overhead, the trains that glide smooth over the bumps in the road of my mind, like getting the kinks out on an ironing board. Cozy heat comforts pleats and my heart in this city is the night bird of Keats…
There is so much pain the world carries every day it spins anew, must I navel-gaze much longer only to miss the few moments that flew on by before I knew. Looking glass to telescope open wide this periscope this is how you truly see the world as it was meant to be. Flowers fall and die and fade only to sprout someplace else, be made, whether by clouds of bees in steamy pollen-filled-days to bare earth and concrete places, or to clean white spaces where with paper and rhyme and pen-off-his-heart some poet will paint the petals so smooth you forgot the death and laugh at the life what flower what love what languish what pain! Clouds move on through every day they pass, like that river proving true but never quite the same to pass, fleeting friendships and the running-rest all subside like fears in the night only when fears submerge to converge in the blank open spaces of dream canopies and commas of catharsis. So it rains, so it ended what is life without being mended. Flailing and falling and failing and mauling at some answers like grizzlies defending her right. My cubs are but dreams but I’ll fight in my heart, to live it all well and treat others from start, with love and respect in the grand scheme of things but also right down to the littlest of moments, for that is what surely brings all of the flowers clinging and mingling to ethereal dust. This is my quest like some far away something of a mystery to me. Just me and the world and music make three. Honest plaintive melodies set to the pulse of this city gliding ‘long this river deep within me and to this rain that I do see. This rain in May, that keeps me at bay. This electro-micro synthesis of pleasure and pain, this forgetting you and loving you as a memory lost to time. This will all take writing and music and time….
Of course, flowers need no music or poetry, and rain comes with or without the world to see. They live and move congruous to some damn divine plan that I’ll just for now surrender myself to.
The moth and the drums
The drums had stopped. A vivid bailable non-cantable that was emanating through the ceiling joists above as if through invisible speakers. Through the soot my eye would travel erased of time and space. Just part of the riff and the raff underground at this hour. This now. Traveling through the crowds and over platforms skimming third rails and sneaking pictures with my pen. These people so varied. This time so unique. And down flutters this little moth I’m not sure from where, in and out of sight through eyelids blinking fast or an old 8mm film. I follow her through the black, lost in white, in and out of dark and light. I turn my head to see the clamor coming up the stairs losing sight of the moth.
“Saddle up, it’s part of the draw,” I sort of say with my eyes as I admired the Delsey luggage being dragged by a sternly focused brunette. I used to have a suitcase like that but mine was black not blue. They had come the long flight and a half up from the tunnel to the 7 and the A, C, E. They seemed an unhappy pair, these Twentysomethings.
Faces flushed and about to burst with sweat, readying themselves, barely off the landing above the last stair, they stood stopped but swaying, with inertia no doubt, huffing and puffing. “I’ve been there,” I think but do not say a thing (sometimes it’s nice just to not connect at all — to watch from afar). They were now firmly settled and the girl with my luggage had gone over the bumpy yellow strip along the open tracks now, greeting danger with reverie, dancing up a storm until, “What!?” she exclaimed off the scoff of her friend throwing her hands up in the air like waving surrender, and then the drumming stopped. As if the drumming-older-brother-upstairs got wind of the merriment being had downstairs to his cathartic concerto, and snatched the groove from under our feet. And it was just like that, the drums had stopped and this little moth, it must’ve been a moth, fluttered rather gracefully downward below my line of vision — intersecting animalistic purity into the mix of human movement.
Fluttering from left to right in pulsing plosives while streaming forward almost bubbling, like spilled soda over a kitchen countertop, She ran smooth but popping bubbles along the way. “There she goes..” I think, “and where did she come from?”
Where is she off too?
Did the drumming rock her loose from her shroud of slumber? Did she reside in the invisible speaker of raw acoustics along the strips of black? Or is her home above the lights where no one really looks? Maybe there’s a little nestled nook where she does hide, inside part of an old sweater found in the lost and found, there’s an old copy of the Economist lying around, with cigarette butts strewn beside. The hearth of the work room pipes greeting hisses to her every day when she would return home.
Her wings, white and clear, but through a silken screen stretched thin. There she flew before me. Flap and stutter, glide and flutter. Capillaries. Concrete. Lost in fluorescence.
Tulips.
Tulips.
Sheer wax
sun and candles
peeling back the gauze
and you burn through me
wide
white
worn
and weathered
I stretch.
You bleed.
I burn
you win.
Tulips. in the sun.
On the road again
Sirens pass and my eyes move beyond their nonspecific glaze of the seat in front me and reach the concrete barricades of this stretch of highway north of Washington. They move across the roughly painted brown and speckled-white thick and glistening giant curb and beyond it to the Mormon church in the distance. Its spires and walls are pure as freshly fallen snow even against this white sky it stands out and makes the heavens glow a dingy grey. Gold crowns spire’s tips like arms raised in rejoicing and this castle floats atop the dark rich green forest like a fairy tale memory come to life or Disneyland.
This bus continues its hum and fall making its way to 95 north and I wander through my memory like a hiker lost amidst trails so familiar to my heart yet so far from recent memory that I don’t know where to turn. Fortunately, four the next few hours, I don’t have to make those decisions at all.
In fact sometimes the joy of public transportation, and in this case semiprivate coach, can be in that realization. That release. That eventual place we all fall into and actually enjoy — once the scratching and pouting subside — that place when adults rock like babies and babies often scream. The place where strangers often gather to be moved in their own way.
And brake lights overcome my vision as inertia moves us forward. 11 miles to 695 in 11 minutes. I guess the rain hasn’t really slowed anyone down after all. We pass a sign for Fort Meade. For lodging and an exit. And still this sky stretched grey speaks to me like an empty canvas weighing down upon my chest. My eyes now feel the pull and my eyelids acquiesce slowing in their blink heavy now with something. But I breathe in very deeply in search of any answers, and my eyes fall back up the road ahead of us. We seem to be flying now, cars gliding along atop water clouds made from the asphalt and precipitation. And skimming the heavens hung in grey and white and black besides we pass over the entrance of 695. Floating, flying atop the clouds in a foggy reverie.
Michael Vitaly Sazonov 