Autumn in New York…

i used to live there below the dry bronx, somewhere
between the rivers when the chrysler and the empire state
were landmarks in the still air, and at night were lighted
like art deco necklaces of the well-heeled and exclusive

we were demi goddesses – fresh from college – our futures
written on our sleeves, our tight, narrow walkups
buried in viewless lightwells and our step step steps
led to the offices of publishers and admen where we toiled
correcting copy imagining ourselves on the other sides
of those large well lighted desks – the ones with the backdrop
of all Manhattan hanging below well-washed windows.

After work the princes would smile at us, suggest a drink
or 2 or 7, hoping to lure us to their edens where the promised
etchings were poor copies in silver frames. politics and the smell
of finance and sex, deadlines and sex, married men and sex,
power and sex and evermore.

we lived on the lower east side, or in the village where streets twist
like mandrake roots and to be in our neighborhood and in the now
was like flying to the top of a mountain.

after keeping our bosses at bay, and smiling like barbie
with our tight tits and cinch belts, we hurried home
to dust and humidity and to christopher street where beer foamed
and flowed and john the dribbler sat on the curb keeping up conversation with anyone and no one,
and charles made his first miniature cities out of little clay bricks that rose on corners
or in the cracks of buildings and we watched them grow
then gradually dissolve into ruins and the air between buildings
was rife with jazz and blues and the sweet odor of sweat and gin,
and trees grew in crazy optimism in hidden gardens behind the facades of lower new york and our
mothers said no, they say men with evil thoughts, men with diseases in their minds, they said
white slavers, they said no, always no.

*

A willful boy
flings his lead airplane
deadly as David’s stone
piercing thin-steeled skin of glass
tearing the fabric of what keeps us safe
opening the closets of fear.

He brought down the towers
into a rubble of the soul.

Our minds fracture
into corridors of risk and danger
undercut at floors ninety and seventy--
day filled with night: thick debris, smoke
and the opacity of our communal
uncertainties.

*

In some tomorrow the horror
will be over-seeped
by contamination
as food and flesh decay
into disease and rot.

Ozymandias
his twin trunks once astride the river of Manhattan
has fallen.

*

You should have been here a week ago,
she says, when the storm waves of terror
roiled in. Instead I woke up
to the ululation of terrible pictures
repeating their unrealities, their unbelievables
on our TV screen.

Over and over the small boy
I cannot see, flings his airplane
against the Lego towers
that look like glass,
over and over the plane dips
its left wing and hones
on the south tower,
over and over it slices through steel
like a brick through balsa,
like a hot knife
through the rectangles of butter
we place on our tables
when we come together as family.

In endless far-too-clear pictures
the plane passes through the building
filling floors and offices
with its wings – its fuselage,
its fully fueled engines
the fireball is real – the silence is not
as the buildings
south then north implode
into street rubble and death –
that’s real –
but the toy plane,
the willful boy,
the throw accurate and deadly
these cannot be imbibed as real.

*

The glass of New York
reflects the sun
whether the world revolves or stands still.

Great glass walls duplicate
the neighborhood or carry on their sides
the bridges, the Hudson, the harbor

or streaming traffic – a river
of red lights flowing north – a river
of white lights flowing south

like waters of Venezuela
that spring from opposite ranges
and meeting at the Orinoco

travel together for miles
steel-grey – tea-tannin-brown –
before melding into blue --

The glass in New York
shows birds’ wings – pigeons and gulls,
an occasional falcon across cliffs of glass.

*

When I lived nearby
we made pilgrimages to see
the latest, the even taller, the newest

glass rising near mid-town
the brown and coppery Seagram,
buildings with impossibly small ground floors,

huge erector sets filling the air spaces
over old churches – we’d lay our heads
back on our napes and gaze

in awe at glass climbing the horizon,
ratcheting into the sky,
jabbing through the clouds,

into the eye of God.

Escape

The pacific fog
muffled and slow as a dirge
slides in against escarpments
and the cliff below me.

I stand on a bluff
that juts into the path of migrating whales,
far from falling towers
and the deliberalities of hate.

The unseen ocean pulses below
like the bellows of a living lung.
My sense of sight is occluded
but a healing breeze

delivers elemental odors of brine
and kelp, of exposed tidelands.
The variegated sounds of waves
build and crash, the final

thin trickle into caves and arches,
and rocks reducing to pebble and sand;
then a sucking withdrawal
as the ocean pulls back its fingers of froth.

boom crash, trickle
The same sounds here as across the country
but this sound carries a different message,
a different musician has scaled these notes.

In the canyons of Manhattan – smoke, debris, endings.
Here, endurance and eternity take hands.

RUNES, A Review Of Poetry is a new annual poetry anthology edited by poets CB Follett and Susan Terris. The first issue featured poems by Jane Hirshfield, Martha Rhodes, David St. John, Ronald Wallace, Richard Wilbur, Eleanor Wilner, and many other fine poets known and unknown.

We believe RUNES has everything a good book should have: comedy, tragedy, satire, drama. There are poems of love, sorrow, pain, laughter. Poems about nature, children, men & women, birth and death. There are poems that rhyme and ones in free verse, lyric poems and narrative ones. Our good friend and advisor David St. John said that this anthology reads like "a survey of the best of everything going on in contemporary American poetry." He went on to say: "Truly astonishingly beautiful, and the work is superb! It's a knock out beginning to end."