Friday Night Rhapsody

      ~ after Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue


You uncoil your fever, indigo
thoughts seeping like smack
from mutant-green trees.

Your neighbor's azaleas burst
forth like long-choked-back
bird calls. You fall in alpaca.

Maybe some strut has leaked
out of you lately. Fleet Week,
and the sailor's don't even salute

your pressed, navy polka-dot dress.
Poor little whore. Where's your hat,
your gloves? Your spare pair

of stockings? Crazy old Maple Leaf
Rag. But a twitch still meddles
the part in your lips so you lick

lemon ice from a flat, roughhewn
wooden spoon- feeling all thumbs
as it splinters your tongue

while the gulls Merce Cunningham
over the New York Bay.
Possessed by this maddening

current like an Empire State
thirst- it's a thirst
you can never drink away.



Brooklyn

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

      ~Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

How long have I breathed in your fermented tunnels, feral
gardens, sweat-licked shores? Your natives still sulk over
the immigration act, but which of them would not give me,
in the blur of a vanishing R train, the salt off their skin?

Breuckelen. You're a Dutch oven in August, assembly lines
of limp laundry hung over egg-carton lawns. Fisherman
lure prey with chicken legs, hawk it for just enough to buy
a fifth and a lotto and can't believe their luck. Your hookah

bars spill cloying smoke into oily buckets of brine-swarming
olives and flies. Broken land. Your cracks swallow up small
children whole! This time of year, they scurry to your shore-
the Russian Riviera mutters the leather-skinned waitress

at Rocco's as she scoops up her tip. Come September
they'll forsake your freak shows and cyclones and this is
the best time for Coney Island, according to a pair of swans
from Sheepshead Bay. Knife-sharpening trucks refuse to quit,

their brassy bells clashing with Mr. Softee's sing-song chimes.
Breezes like cool limes baptize my brow over and over
saying welcome home, sister. You belong to me, now.