holy postcards from new york city
Finally, across the river it appears, languid as a waking cat, a gray panther rippling and slowly rising, turning its head my way. Through the train window, I see New York for the first time.
The music of the train on the tracks beats the rhythm of the city.
I’ve been to every single book I know
to soothe the thoughts that plague me sostop before you start
be still my beating heart(be – still – my – beat – ing – heart)
— Sting, Be Still My Beating Heart
I have the giddy excitement of the young artist wrapped in the aging body of the immigrant family patriarch. I think about how my family first came to New York by boat from the icy waters of Sweden and Denmark. My 12-year-old great-grandmother bringing her young girl heart and sweet possessions in a curving trunk with little blue flowers embossed and painted on the tin between arcing wooden ribs. My grandmother born first generation in this country.
I remember a great-great-grandfather who sailed between Denmark and the U.S. multiple times, checking on his sons in America, darning their socks I am told in childhood stories, and cooking with them, these young green men eating the traditional food of their father and his homeland.
My people leave. We go. The descendants of Vikings, we sense a larger world, and make epic voyages to find places of a scale to match our vision. Or so we tell ourselves. We feel confined, is the root cause. Constricted, by small minds and limited opportunities and a blood sense that there is more to us than we have yet seen in ourselves. We chain ourselves with responsibilities, then chafe raw against the shackles. We create home, then leave it behind.
You tell him to come in sit down
but something makes you turn around
The door is open you can’t close your shelter
You try the handle of the road
It opens do not be afraid
It’s you my love, you who are the stranger
It’s you my love, you who are the stranger.— Leonard Cohen, The Stranger Song
It’s not particularly noble. But it is fierce, and within each generation, we seem to have one who feels it like a burning in the skin, some fire that can only be quenched by returning to the sea, to windswept ice and snow, to mountain peaks – to wild and endless vistas. My grandpa Holger left his farm and young family to see the wide Pacific, breathing with the endless tides. My father left the midwest farm over and over, for the cowboy dream of the West, for the oceans, for the mountains, for a traveler’s life across America.
Where do I put this fire
this bright red feeling
this tiger lily down my throat
it wants to grow to 20 feet tallI’ve left bethlehem
I feel free
I’ve left the girl I was supposed to be and
someday I’ll be born— Paula Cole, Tiger
I want to leave America itself – so first, I am returning to the gateway. Where languages swirl from the streets through books I have read and never read and poems yet to be written. New York: oh holy Mecca of poets. To find myself at home among my patron saints, living and gone. So I can go.
We create the gods we kill
then give them
immortality…— Sting, 50,000
I cannot write one essay that captures my week in New York. I will be sending postcards from New York for the rest of my life, 4×6 illuminated manuscripts of ordinary street life written in holy water from the filthy Hudson and East rivers. As a pilgrim on this spiral poet’s path, walking through Central Park and over the Brooklyn Bridge and down into the subway stations was every bit as sacred as entering a zendo or a cathedral or circling the kaaba, the huge dark squares of this city containing the alien, meteoric soul of word and rhythm and sound, survived from beyond familiar life and atmosphere to arrive burning with the message of endless worlds and endless possibilities.
Step outside
take a step outside …
heart’s on fire
leave it all behind you …
dark as night
let the lightning guide you …— Jose Gonzalez, Step Out
It has birthed a tiny book, chapbook preemie still in the supportive incubator of layout and typeface, its photos taped like oxygen tubes into its tiny nostrils, reaching and softly kicking the smallest arms and legs of lyric and image. It is growing into it’s strongest self, now, under caring attendance. It is warm, and alive. Like a new generation in this land of immigrants. Like a newly-discovered holy scroll written on crumbling newspaper unearthed beneath a torn-up subway track. I will take it with me; and ultimately, I will stand it on it’s own strength, and I will leave it behind.