Lament for the Makers of Brooklyn - Poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 2004 by D. Nurkse

   1

   Where is Policastro the locksmith now?
   He squinted through two pairs of glasses
   held together with duct tape,
   and arranged hasp, tongue, eye screw
   on a deal table-everything ordered
   by resistance, scrim of rust,
   flange, interlocking wheel,
   name, distance from the body.
   Afterward the key turned
   for you but not for me.
   He charged us $11.39.
   We tipped and he smiled bitterly.
   Perhaps he would have smiled the same
   if we'd paid the flat amount-perhaps
   he had a bitter smile

   Where is Simon his cousin who fixed the windows,
   assembling mossy torpedo-shaped weights
   and flat-linked chain spliced to steel chord,
   beveled panels of the embrasure
   that fitted into themselves
   to make a plane, a sheen
   over invisible labor?--later
   the window lodged at a cant
   for you, and for me slid open
   on a street of moving vans.

   Where is Mr. Fuchs with his green wrench
   who consulted a brass thermometer
   and opened the hydrants in the great heat?
   He stood behind the plume of spray
   as with a young bride in a lace veil.

   What happened to the children who lunged after
   spaldeens
   and found them floating toward Accra in the gutter,
   glinting with gasoline rainbows ?

   Any news of Vera B. Wick
   who raised Clarence and Latisha
   in a room no bigger than a tablecloth,
   sending them out in starched kneesocks
   to face the voice whispering duji?

   Who remembers Clarissa Green
   who organized the Croatians at Knox Forge
   with a Berlitz phrasebook wrapped in foil:
   shouldn't this life be easier?
   Stiff with MS, she took on Bridal Shower
   where the carders drool from mercury-she
   marched straight up to the guardhouse
   and announced I have an appointment.

   What happened to Anselm, who owned the pigeons
   that made immense whirling obelisks
   and spires, only to disappear
   with a single will, toward Bayonne?

   2
   Once I met a crossing guard from the old neighborhood
   at a side table in Starbucks.
   She blew on her steamed milk
   and tapped her fingers to 'N Sync.

   Once I met a pipefitter
   who had invested on a whim in Power Disk
   and made a fortune, and lost it:
   so deep in debt he still walked
   with the wary nonchalance
   of a poor man become the center of the world--he
   wore a belt with a mother-of-pearl buckle
   and his initials wrought as twisting snakes:
   he confided to me, perhaps this was the afterlife,
   surely he died from a stray bullet
   in that year when the children
   began crying for bottled Swiss water.

   3
   Remember how we lay in the great heat
   in our walkup on Sealey Street
   between the immense park and the huger cemetery?
   The neighbor's radio played Fearless Heart
   but whenever we tried to listen to our own music
   a plane passed, circling LaGuardia--
   how desperate we were to leave each other,
   sensing a shift in power
   in the mourning dove's quavering voice,
   a new age in the humming clock--Reagan,
   Bush, Clinton, Bush,
   constant whoosh of traffic
   passing to the Island

   as if even our bodies, naked, linked
   by a stray arm, were time,
   and the candor of our marriage
   confined us in childhood.

   4
   Last night I met the knife grinder
   whose cart with its infuriating bell
   jolted among the elms
   riddled with lovers' names
   in the dead of summer,
   so that wives left their dark houses
   and came to him and offered
   the carving knives from their trousseaus

   and he described to me, with a flicker
   of his tiny nicotine stained hands,
   how he cut the little holes in the straw hat
   so his horse's ears would be comfortable,
   and how he honed the blade
   so keen you could not feel it cut.

D. Nurkse is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Fall.