Traffic Island; Corolla Island

Traffic Island

 

Traffic island on 69th and Myrtle

in Ridgewood, the bricks edge to edge

evenly in perfect rectangles

except the borders where the curb

shores them in irregularly,

cut short or slanted around the feet

of the bus benches, mailbox, flower pot.

 

Their grid is spiral-plotted

by the feet of a fervent believer.

A spell of twirling, stepping left or right

with fingers and wrists torquing

an invisible sphere, twirling again,

the olive-drab thawb ruffling out

like an Elizabethan collar,

the taqiyah tilted back

with the back of the head,

eyes heavenward.

And then I see he means to say

that I’m not welcome. Says I’m a homo.

Because I believe we’re truly brothers

I sit silent on the bench to taunt him.

 

Next to the fish market,

the turkeys are crammed in

in white and dirty white

in a dirty grey garage

with metal shelving cages.

They all crane with nervous gobbles

toward the sunlight,

their white heads

baldish and priestly.

 

We have our spells.

Me and Sidney sing

“every n-i-g-h-t we drink

a-way the day A.A. meet-ing

an-oth-er way a-way from

our re-al feel-ings”.

 

God’s top machinery keeps spinning,

my neighbor whirls away the white devil,

turkeys gobble light,

and we hold our noses while we drink.

 

 

 

Corolla Island

 

We turn up out of the wheel ruts along the shore

and the dunes pile on as we tool around

to paradise, or that way, father and son

and a bottle of Jameson tinkering against

the gearshift of the jeep. Back into light

 

beach-pine, the houses hunker down from white

enamelled, promontories against the breakers

to bungalows, weathered neon, mostly

abandoned to scatters of contract equipment

refrigerators, intractable engines

 

and the child’s sweater flat in the dooryard

next to the broken jet plane, the cabin

flooded with an inch of rainwater.

Neither of us sings in the proper key

we can’t quite hear of the radio under

the engine over the ocean’s lulling

machinery as we wish we “had a pencil

thin moustache, the ‘Boston Blackie’ kind,

a two-toned Ricky Ricardo jacket and

an autographed picture of Andy Devine”.

 

He puffs awkwardly on one of my smokes.

The opium eater asks me if a man

can weigh off the glories of dawn against the ruin

of hurricane, and my father just keeps driving,

the gauze of the motor revolving. Our shared quiet

 

is where we’re driving to, all around

the white noise, of the ocean where nothing else

is meant by a kingfisher skimming over.

 

David Hutcheson