Cheating at Solitaire
Somewhere in Brooklyn, a nurse walks out of the hospital where I was born,
lifts a cellphone to her ear & makes nightclub plans. Somewhere else
a waitress tallies her tips behind the counter of a neighborhood diner
then slides some bills from the stack for the busboys. The lights of the borough
incandescent in certain windows, in the county of Kings. Near Coney Island
a tattooist looks again at a photo of his ex-girlfriend’s arm—
the artwork there of a winning hand, a full house, Jacks
inside Queens. He said to me once how lucky he’d felt to be with her,
his voice a whisper above the ink gun’s electric whine & buzz.
Permanence only a fantasy. Somewhere in Brooklyn
my father is dying—it’s been this way for years.
He used to play, daily, hand after hand of seven card stud,
thick cigarette smoke hovering. When I think of him at all
it’s not as a body slowly giving up to the grievances of a life lived,
but as a young man, maybe only my son’s age—skinny,
handsome, a Marlboro loitering on an ashtray’s lip, close by,
as he filled in a ledger of debts & winnings. He used to insist
you could put a value on anything, even a Sunday afternoon
with his son. Even a night like this one, with the street exhaling
the accumulated day’s heat, & the last softball players at Prospect Park
walking home. Somewhere in Brooklyn an F train clatters & rocks
right by the window where I used to sleep, before the phrase visitation rights
became a part of the vocabulary. Before the Carter Administration.
Before the Surgeon General’s warnings. Now it’s been forgotten
& the lights in the subway cars flicker briefly, then return
as the train makes its way toward Manhattan, cantankerous
screech of steel on steel, those rails, those wheels.
In the train someone sleeping, someone else going to her late shift,
someone leaving for good, someone playing solitaire on his phone—
turning over cards & swiping them in place. Losing again.
When I’d play as a child, I’d flip three cards at once, the way I’d been taught,
but sometimes I’d slide the middle one out & use it, cheating
because back then I believed a win was worth it
even though no one else knew or even cared, & it was all chance anyway.
I just wanted to be like my father, to hold a winning hand.
My father, somewhere in Brooklyn, is dying, his large body
surprisingly frail. The last time I saw him I no longer recall—
this happens sometimes between fathers & sons. I’m no prince,
just a knave but not naïve enough to believe in reconciliation.
No, my father—a Taurus—taught me bullheadedness,
taught me to bluff against a full house, & taught me how to lose.
In Brooklyn, new construction builds apartments near the Gowanus Canal
& near Sheepshead Bay both, but the mid-century boardwalk attractions
at Coney Island remain. Games of chance light up the arcades,
& even if the freak exhibit is now called the Circus Sideshow,
it still hosts a magician who works with giant decks of playing cards
making kings appear from deuces & fives, just so much
illusion & sleight-of-hand. As a child that always seemed like enough.
What might the psychic there have foreseen with her cards,
those Major & Minor Arcana, in the dog days before I was born?
Laughing Gulls dive for French fries or else perch on benches, curious.
Somewhere in Brooklyn someone croons a sad song in a cabaret.
Her voice soulful. Her lips cabernet red. The melody crashing like waves
against the sand bars, that slow erosion of shore to ocean.
Passport
Unnoticed for so many years
just north of the interstate
ascending a hill face
on Cumberland’s east side I see
in today’s early sun, headstones
aglow quicksilver as if
electrified & lit &
so couldn’t be missed, dawn
on polished marble, granite, all
the squares like west-facing
windows at sundown
in apartment complexes,
a faraway city in these—
exceptionalism’s waning days.
Each rectangle of wet light
a story, most likely melancholic.
Winter still clasped so that
red flash I think I saw
(Let’s face it, I passed it all
in an instant) must have been
a wilting bouquet:
some poppies or carnations
from yesterday or else plastic
flowers insisting by their own
permanence a promise
of devotion, of not-forgetting.
Nothing in the rearview
can clarify. Experience suggests
names & dates are inscribed
on those stones, suggests, too,
last week’s snow, tomorrow’s wind
will slowly erode them all to
namelessness. Ahead another
100 miles to Dulles International,
to one more stamp on my passport,
that booklet chronicling a decade
of heartache & ambition, as well
as the wanderlust that’s informed
my journals since Brooklyn.
A palmist once held my wrist
while sliding her index finger
over my open hand, it was
not meant to be sensual,
just intimate, her painted nail
tracing the crosshatch creases
like highways on a forgotten
atlas, & she insisted the lifeline
just defines a plot, the details
themselves nebulous.
It’s no wonder, then,
the gunmen told us that night
(so many years ago as to be
another life or a dream)
to put up our hands despite
it being cliché—he was trying
to decide whom to shoot
& who would remain unscathed
although the answer was
none of us, after all. Trauma’s
like that. It becomes
the story we dread to tell
& tell anyway, embellishing
it despite our intentions
to stick to the facts, when asked.
Eventually, they’ll check
my bags for weapons, X-ray me
after I remove my belt,
my shoes. For months afterward
I saw flowers left against
the light post on the corner
where it had happened—real ones,
simple, the kind you can buy,
because these things happen,
on big city streets, so much
love & loss & conciliation,
a small memorial despite
the sulfur smell long dissipated.
How they’d wilt then rot
until someone nameless
would throw them away.
On every flight there’s always
someone carrying a bouquet,
& someone else who’s crying.
The woman in the aisle seat
will pray at takeoff, & I’ll
mouth the words along with her
though I no longer believe
in a god who intervenes.
Rosary in her tense fingers,
she sits upright, words awhisper,
each bead gravestone grey,
each like a city on map.
A Conversation Between Friends
We were seated at a corner booth,
the kind of table we’d sat at often,
even requested before, although this one
had a slight, obnoxious wobble.
The waitress brought water, two glasses, luke warm.
The waitress asked if we wanted something to drink.
It wasn’t the kind of placed that served spirits.
We were seated at a corner booth
& could watch traffic on the avenue outside
through the large bay windows,
people driving into their lives or looking to park.
It was the kind of place with a giant menu,
yet most people ordered one of five things—
I had a hamburger deluxe, coffee;
she asked for a BLT club, which came
cut in quarters, each with a toothpick holding it together,
a frill of colored plastic at their tops,
each like an anemic cheerleader’s pom-pom.
The kind of place cheerleaders & star athletes
go to after high school sporting events,
& so too the alternative kids late at night
when there was no place else to go.
We’d been seated at a corner booth
& she told me she planned to divorce her husband.
How many times had we been in this place
or a place just like it, & discussed
the lit fuse of love only to have it sputter out
later, the whole idea of love a dud, one of us
or the other disgusted, disheartened:
no glorious explosion, no cascade of sparks.
We weren’t lovers. That’s not the point of this.
I took her hand from across the table
the way I had watched people do in movies,
in all the old dramas, a gesture
of solidarity or sympathy, who could say?
The waitress poured more coffee in my mug.
It was the kind of place where they did that
without asking, and where they left people alone
to whatever distress or joy unfolded
under those lights. The coffee just a light brown
sheen with a watery edge. She didn’t cry.
I was the kind of friend who knew the back story
so wouldn’t ask questions. She’d do the same for me.
She’d done it before, in a place just like this
on Route 35 not far from Asbury Park,
where we’d been seated at a corner booth.
I remember some guy at a nearby table
sat, gasping in a way that, at first glance,
might have required an ambulance, but no
it was just grief or else suppressed laughter.
I thought we couldn’t tell then because we’d been young
but even now, nearly 40 years later I know
neither of us could say for sure exactly what he felt
even though both of us, by then, had been caught
in sudden chill and couldn’t catch our breath.
