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Not Painted, NYC, 1970’s

Margaret Wilmot

A Hot January

First publication: March 2006

http://badosa.com/p155

BOY WITH BASKETBALL

In sneakers and singlet he smiles sprinting by.

The narrow housefronts flush, grow warm.

Children on a stoop talk rules to a game, pointing out

sidewalk trees, which, thickly green, give off

a breath of summer, and day’s end. Lime-green

a woman slices over to the cafe, all glass, all reflection

as a red sun burns down to the horizon.

I think of painting the scene, how pictures are worth

a hundred words for catching memory; yet too

how catching memory stops it there, mid-moment,

before it bounces off a tree, and ricochets

across to the children on the stoop;

stops it mid-flight in its mysterious trajectory before

it soars high through a hoop of lamppost.

PICK-UP WITH WINGS

He fell in step beside me talking pigeons, a gentle

Puerto Rican named Ramon, and on the gritty wind

I saw white wings lifting the way they do in movies.

He passed hours in their company, how much he loved

those birds and their soft ways he couldn’t even say...

His look fluttered my eyes up past dingy windows as if

towards putti in some high grey sky off Avenue B.

Once he took the bus to Philadelphia and let one fly—

I saw his brown hands love the bird aloft. Crowline

it came back to the East Side! He shone, a sun of pride.

Once he was ill, he got the flu, it was a catastrophe,

his friend got careless... Something in his face

fluffed out and dropped. I almost stooped

to catch its wings from sidewalk grime.

SPANISH ONIONS

Palaces of the mind’s desire the bookshops,

and then outside musicians playing in the night;

further on a man stands framed beneath a street-light

throwing knives while chips and glints of light fall

round him in a Village fountain. Uptown other fountains...

At Lincoln Center Sunday afternoon, how to choose

between two operas, a recital, a concert or a play?

Walking back from Max’s Kansas City late

one hot evening, tips tucked inside my bra,

smoky murk and kitchen smells dissolving,

I come upon a pile of purple onions, so beautiful, surreal

in the gutter—and feel like the fairy-tale youth before

the gold: “Take all you can carry,” cackles the witch.

You can only carry seven Spanish onions in a mini-skirt.

THAT STRANGE INTIMACY

A huge beetle buzzes into the white light as we sit

chatting late. The cat freezes, her muscles quiver,

she rolls forward, springs, falls back unsuccessful;

crouches taut, ears, eyes following the whir of wings.

The insect ricochets against a plaster cast, and Venus springs again,

bats out a paw, and misses. The expanse of paint-splashed linoleum

has become a wide arena. By now we all are silent, watching.

Privy to that strange intimacy which unfolds around

an ancient amphora, we witness strings of energy spin forth

between the hunter and the hunted—as if no neon tubing

nor open windows can change the rules in this game.

Nor the outcome: old vases show the hunter always wins.

Sleekly black she stalks, darts, poises; a leap takes off

one armoured wing. The beetle limps in air.

PAINTING

A crouching jaguar swings his bat, hits

the dandelion-sun in a great arc. Shouts in English,

Spanish, Spanglish hang their scrim between

the diamond and high rectangles which frame the Park.

The painter buys a pretzal, pauses. The batter’s grace,

the warmth and bony cheeks in his brown face recall Mexico.

Not dandelion. Quetzal-sun. Red snapper-sun.

Windows wide to the unmoving air that night, he squeezes

Cadmium Yellow Light onto the old palette-board

and paints a jaguar-sun crouched round a Tree of Life.

Tries a geometric scrim for background but paints it out again.

His hated father took him to baseball games.

If only we could isolate memories. He adds lampblack

to the sun and it turns green. Pours himself a scotch.

AUGUST 1974

I would have expected a fantasy of kites over Sheep Meadow:

paper eagles, dragonflies, a silver-bellied fish catching

the sun on rainbow scales—or perhaps the sharing as when

rain breaks a hard drought, melting dusty faces towards each other.

Yet in Central Park nothing seems different: people still sprawl,

throw frisbees, nosh, bicker, sleep. A parent removes a toddler’s reins

and a ball of energy takes off in a wide arc across the green.

Yet the president has resigned. This is significant.

Some tectonic plate in politics has shifted for us all.

A shiver crawled my skin when the radio-announcer

spoke the words. I grabbed my keys and charged outside

wanting bunting! balloons! While now here I am, alone

by the still reservoir watching a young goose

arch his neck against the skyline of Fifth Avenue.

WINDOW-SHOPPING AT TIFFANY’S

Of course, it will never be the same.

The words catch me on their bored barbs; brittle,

her tone, bitter. I glance briefly at a platinum-blond.

This is not enduring love (as I listen on) but what

the insurance money will afford. You always wanted sapphires!

He so eager to please, but Oh what’s the use!

petulantly floats back through the revolving-door.

A sapphire wave shot through with glints of emerald

sheers me on down Fifth Avenue. I window-shop

at Tiffany’s for colours ripe as fruit on the eye’s tongue.

“I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat,

and squeeze you a cup full of diamond juice.”

Topaz light plays like a fairy-child through

high windows. Skyscrapers turn amethyst.

NOT UNPAINTED

Lime-green climbs one wall in steps and turns

the corner into sapphire over a base of purple lake;

cadmium orange pulses above a few paint-cans

ranged along a rainbow strip of sheet. Cushions.

A fireplace she feeds with wood from dumpsters.

Space is everywhere. This is the living-room where

we drink wine and read each other letters from Italy.

A week later the colours have changed, again.

The paint was just sulking on the wall! She laughs at

my discomfiture—as if a terra-cotta wash may casually

efface what lies between us. Singing in the Dolomites.

Naming her cat ‘Tocai.’ Suppers in my father’s studio.

No, for that it will take the grit and chip

and splash and scrape of life itself.

THE SKEWED HEART

It could be a Found Object, or framed behind glass,

or Arte Povera, just tossed there in a space

for people to say, Why is this art? I’ll give them art,

this heart-shaped pot-holder, cut askew.

I picture the child who gave her heart to my brittle tenant,

who left it hanging above my stove. Though three of

my favourite cookbooks are missing, presumed taken.

It could be—but I like paint, its warmth of reds,

strokes layered and juxtaposed like stitches of love

finding each other and glowing in each other’s company;

reds which laugh when the polka-dot kisses shower down

in tiny white hearts dancing like the light in a child’s eyes as

she watches the brittle blond outside Tiffany’s

pick up her present and start to unwrap it.

MINUTES

Click-tock, click-tock. The tower-clock near my window

in a small Dolomite town is urging me to hurry;

it’s very early, the hotel is still, no one else in the ski-gang

is awake, but I dash on clothes and jacket and let

the sound and the transparent light pull me outside;

I know that all of life and love and language are breathing

clouds of steam as they wait in the sharp snow-air.

But no, tock: these are high-heels on the sidewalk

along Barrow Street where I am sitting at my desk

(a smooth door, big enough for typewriter and cat)

distracted by papers to correct before class, and a purring

in the afternoon sun, and the surreal vision

of a high-heeled secretary marking once-upon-a-time

on a faded red tower-clock one mountain morning.

CHAT WITH HAT

Was it good? A passenger on the cross-town bus

notices the catalogue under someone’s arm. Pretty good,

but not up to all the hype. Another person adds his two-cents-worth,

I agree. I ring the bell, get off with a wiry old woman who

somehow becomes Dorothy as we wait for the light

to cross Columbus. Well, I’m off to buy my husband a hat.

I assume I’m just making conversation. I’ll give you a hat,

brand new! she says. My husband loved hats. He died last year.

Her high-rise is geometric concrete. Security waves us through.

First the flu, and then one long catastrophe. I’m feeling

that shyness before a stranger’s space. She hands me

a plaid hat, remarkably small, in a dusty wrap.

I miss the dancing. We were always dancing.

Her eyes shine luminous as windows.

VALENTINE

So many snow-storms that winter.

Seventy-Second Street was white all the way to the Park.

Then Valentine’s Day approached with its storm of red hearts.

Every size and shade—plum and pomegranate, ruby and rose—

danced through shop windows, all glowing in each other’s company,

laughing when the huge soft flakes fell kissing the plate glass.

People became polite, helped old ladies across the great drifts

which accumulated at the corner of Amsterdam, smiling

as if we were all Tin Woodmen warm with the new hearts

the Wizard of Winter had implanted in our tin breasts.

A homeless Santa appeared at the subway entrance joking as

he begged he fit right in. Until the Thaw and the Flood.

Then you needed water-wings to get to Gray’s Papaya.

One morning we awoke to shamrocks, shop windows green.

LIFTS

The panelling has been rubbed to a soft sheen. Its grain,

its small knots swirl toward ebony butterfly joints, then away.

There is a mirror of a most particular flat cross-shape, set in

its own narrow frame, flanked by pairs of lamps with

fluted shades. A scroll turns beneath moulding shimmed

to lift the simply inlaid ceiling higher. If you live on

the Tenth Floor you spend a lot of time in the elevator.

Barrow Street was a walk-up. I must have clocked up days going

up and down the drab staircase where someone had scrawled ‘coglioni;’

the black crayon displayed no hint toward humour or finesse.

In four years it never occurred to me to paint it over.

My pop-artist neighbour might have made a mural in sky-blue,

flesh-pink and white of Seven Sailors Rolling

Arm in Arm Abreast Down Seventh Avenue.

FIRE-ESCAPE

A slender crane slants through the Boteros’ picnic, spread

festively on their fire-escape. From the third floor across the Avenue

a painter surveys the scene: plump family hatched by bars

and stripes of sun and shadow. Round plates, round casserole:

as she serves, every move la señora makes is round.

The crane swivels. The girl’s blouse is candy-cane.

Green clouds of sumac roll beneath the rails one floor down.

The innocence slips sideways into a festival an artist-friend

painted on his mind: how each year when she was young

children in Japan folded paper cranes to float on streams

in honour of the day the Cowboy greets the Princess of the Loom.

In the mysterious trajectory of the stars each day is combed with visions.

The breeze smells of river; it tugs the little girl’s petticoat,

lifts and flutters it like a white wing. She squeals.