I get home late, and no milk for tomorrow’s coffee sends me to the corner store to provision up. Something has just happened. There are guys pacing around, an undissipated energy, like the dust devils of cigarette butts that sometimes dance in the gutter. I push through them, I’m on a mission. But I can’t help but hear the conversation:

“ I think he was approaching me in a respectful manner. I do.”
“Man, he had a baseball bat! I don’t know, I think that’s kind of physical.”

I can’t help but grin at them. I’m going to miss this like crazy. I'm going to Burning Man and returning after Labor Day. I hope everyone has a wonderful end of summer.

The poetry in this day is in the slivers between this and that. Or the differences between here and there. The counterpoint, the rough edge, the 18 degrees off center.

They are pulling up the concrete in front of the old Algemeiner Daily building again. Last week there was fresh cement, a lace of raw sewage, the remnants of a burst main. I pass them drilling. My feet are moving at one speed but my hand wants to be a cardinal, making the shape of the wing, the breast, the fold of the feet, the determination of the beak.

Fall has come early, a surprise, and it forces me to the other side of the street seeking light. They film a TV show here now and people have made a game of identifying buildings, making matches. Someone says “the Bialystoker Home for the Aged is the New Zealand Consulate” and I stifle my mirth until tears come to my eyes.

I go out at midday for a good, 4-dimensional coffee, the kind that is so gritty and deep it bends time. I have been trying to get numbers to tell me a story but they are being a maze instead. Double-back, blind-alley, the slow blank blinking of no discernable pattern. But still I have this soaring joy, this rusty bucket is found beautiful, this spotted apple asks to be bitten, this gorgeous noise in my head swells and here there are no shadows.

Our hands are on the stage. We are too close for the subtler mix of instruments, the cello, the violin, the French horn. What we get is the percussive waves of bass and drums, the vibrations of the earth in our chests. The man behind me, I can feel his breath on my bare arm. I don’t want him to think about my shoulder, what it would look like under the street lamp by his front gate. I don’t want my face to make him make me promises he has never been able to keep, find fleeting faith in the light on my teeth.

I am home in 19 minutes after flipping off the pups that steal the first viable cab on the corner. Learning, when you are 22, that someone will cuss you out, in front of your girlfriend, for acts of rudeness, is important. This city is not so anonymous as one might think, and this may be your playground, but it’s my home, so take off your shoes and leave your mud on the doorstep. Dick head.

Strong Roumanian coffee and the delight at hearing “From Blown Speakers” played live and loud wake me up in circuits all night and this morning I am still jazzed on the train, but trying not to take up too much space with my joy. I’ve got a meeting at 9.30, a presentation at 10, a conference call at 10.30 and I am pulling this day with my teeth, pulling through to my promise, tonight I will run fast and hard, feel the pound and shake of the earth through my body, give myself what I need to create the thing that I am.

Moving around a lot when I was younger got me in the discard habit. If I hadn't looked at it, thought about it, or used it in three months, it got tossed. Not only did I have less to move, but I also had less to think about altogether, less backlog of intentions.

I'm a little more flexible on that now, but I do still complete sweeps out, and today is one of them. Friends, if you have not written in your blog in more than three months, you're off my links. Every day I hope you will tell me something, anything, but you are being otherwise occupied. It's not a diss, it's a fact. Let me know when you are back at it, because I'd like to be there with you.

On the black rubber handrail of the escalator, someone has tagged “Vicious” in silver paint pen. The i’s are dotted with friendly open circles. Someone has a delicious sense of humor, or is tragically clueless.

There is a cab stand outside the station, where the Chinese drivers can stop without getting a ticket, go into Golden Carriage and get a dollar bun, pee, chat with the counter girls. The ad on a vacant taxi says “Necessary Objects” in candy bright letters, and I wonder what the marketers think those might be.

When I got back into the country, to my house, the New York Times was waiting for me. The weekend edition, with a big story on the new trend of “real-estate enabled divorces,” people cashing out on their houses and their marriages when they benefit most. I can’t read further than the first few paragraphs.

She says “you don’t call him your boyfriend.” And she is right. I don’t know what to call this thing made of words and carefully avoided promises. I don’t know how to bridge the expectations of my well meaning friends and what happens in my sedimentary layers. If I had to, I would spread my fingers over my ribs and say I hope he would consider that home.

She is the ugliest queen I have ever seen. She is huge, raw-boned, and in an attempt to starve herself into feminine delicacy she has made cheekbones you could hang hockey sticks on, skin cleaving tight over ropy arm muscles. It’s not clear what makes up her small breasts. It’s not the drugs, she’s got a 36-hour shadow going on, and where she has shaved her thighs and throat rough burrs of hair are corkscrewing through, a regular and obvious black dapple on brown skin. There is still glitter on her collarbones from last night’s, or this morning’s, party and in the tired matty weave she is trying to untangle with her hands. Her black nylons are torn, a long vertical finger pointing to the dark band of the control-top sticking out from the bottom of her hot pants. She has no belly to be flattened, it must be other parts she wants smoothed away.

I hope she got whatever she was looking for, pleasure or money or both, when she went out last night. This is a most epic walk of shame, here, in the harsh subway glare rush hour. I’ll get off at my station now, walk past my neighborhood guys, enter my secure home. I wonder what her walk home will be, what the street corner men say to her, what waits for her behind the metal fire door of her apartment. I leave her on a Bed-Stuy bound train, hoping she walks in grace. Her courage to be has already attained her beauty, in a sense.

So there. I have written what I needed to for today, filled my quota, scratched my itch of words. But I have not told you about looking up from my book to see the hand clutching the subway pole. The hand with an attenuated subway map tattooed on the back of it. Each finger is labeled a borough: Manhattan, Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn; Staten Island is the thumb. It is right and fitting that Brooklyn is the index finger, pointing, accusing, exclaiming, aggressive promontory. I am not sure why Manhattan is the pinky, the weakling, and Staten Island is the one that sets us apart from all other animals with its critical utility. For a moment I ponder that maybe the existence of the entire city is mapped to his hand. If he were to get a cut on Queens, the power might go out. A blister on Manhattan could cause a heat inversion. If the Bronx got severed, it might disappear completely. Poof.

I also have not told you about a quiet Saturday morning in a hotel hallway, waiting for the elevator. My experience of Europe overall is that it is so much quieter than where I live. It is so quiet in this hallway now, I can hear the shower running in my room. It is so quiet, I can hear him singing. The hotel is waking up, it is a long wait for the elevator, and I have the time to just listen, to the rush of water, to the song I know now. Over the course of the day, that song will float up time and again, background to the hours of traveling that take me back to Brooklyn. When I arrive, he is not there, only in the song in my head.

Today on the subway platform is the guy who looks just like the Christopher Reeves’ Clark Kent. Impossibly square jaw, thick curly hair with that fetching forelock, even the “don’t look at me, I’m not really gorgeous” dork glasses. We have side-eyed each other before. Now he is stretching leisurely, pulling off his sweatshirt. Superman is getting rather a pot belly.

At work, they ask me “what was your favorite thing?” about my vacation, and what flashes immediately is the first split of the man’s smile, the boy bounding like a spaniel through an exhibit on space travel, the girl taking my hand as we streamed through traffic.

I say “the Van Gogh Museum.” Because I don’t think they want to hear about where my real life is. Or perhaps it’s that I don’t want to tell it. I wonder how hard a person that makes me seem, how ferociously I protect what is precious, how many of my streams I keep underground.

How much I am hiding even in that sanitized answer. I did not say how many times there were tears running down my face, how many times I had to walk away from a painting only to circle back, how my legs shook, how my knees gave way.

I am not at all ashamed of how I feel. I just don’t know how to translate that into the public sphere, how to transverse casual conversation with the Grand Central station of thought tracks I have going on at any one time.

The girl with the Waring blender tattoo is on my subway platform again this morning. I’ve got a week’s worth of images and moments to catch up on and I worry that before I can synthesize them, the onrush of the everyday will overcome them.

I can’t yet tell which is most important, there is so much, and I don’t want to indicate prominence by first placement. Unsure of international traveling and sufficiently cowed by bureaucracy I don’t understand, I am at the airport in New York very early. There is a paucity of viable choices at the bookstore. I pick Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” even though I didn’t think it would be a cheery way to start a reunion with adored ones. It was worse than that. I used it to write notes to myself:

In the midst of death we are in life. We are surrounded by death-the death of ideals, the unquestioning swallow of media, her wrenching her child’s arm in impatience and anger at having missed the train, pretending to be asleep when your lover grazes your bare back with his hand.

from the muddy banks of wishful thinking. the phone rings. she twirls her hair.

We have been waiting for two hours in the dark. Now we depart, in a cracking lightning storm.

Lessons in Global Domination

At this construction shed erected on East Broadway, three 10-year-old boys are playing. One has climbed up the braces, “I’m the king of the world!” he hollers from his perch. “I’m the king of the world!” His two friends are weaving in and out of the uprights, playing a dizzying game of chase, they can’t be bothered by his exhortations to royalty, so he amends his claim, “Or, at least the king of this country!”

He is the prophet of Key Food on President Street. His is the Church of the Bent Spoon, scriptures written on the insides of eggshells. He will importune you from his milk crate on the corner and when his alms add up to a beer, he will go inside to the redeemer. A holy ghost passing all the shiny brightness, he is heard to say “An ounce of prevention is getting heavier every day.”

Meanwhile, the lovers on the train fit themselves together like puzzle pieces, her forehead along the stripe of his nose, the hands on the clock at old Jewish Daily Forward building are still revolving, and Knobs is leaning on his broom and waiting for the morning ballet of opposite side parking.

I don’t need any one thing but one friend likes to remind me through small gifts, a little toy car, a keychain with an Eiffel Tower on it, that she thinks I need to travel. It’s a somersault she needed to tumble out of her parents’ upper-class shadow boxed existence and into a real life. I am not so sure I need the mental gymnastics but the tiny traveling circus is going to Europe and I am invited along. I have faint dreams of being an aerialist, but I’ll probably be watering the elephants and I don’t mind taking care of the earth while watching the stars.

I’ll be back in a week. I’ll try not to miss this.

The only thing separating her from the street is the very short distance from there to her seat behind the reception desk. It’s enough to have garnered her a shiny motorcycle, but she is still missing three teeth. Her t-shirt is cut into a deep V in the front, into strips in the back so she can tie it tightly across her mingy chest.

Today there are no croissants, so it’s a slab of corn bread instead and the man behind the counter smiles at me, shows me the charming gap between his teeth, and says it’s been a long time. A woman shoulders in next to me, brays for Sammy to get her something to wipe her carton of orange juice with so she doesn’t have to touch the condensation. So now I know his name.

I have not seen Knobs, in his white guayabera, leaning on his broom, for a couple of days. He’s at an age when a sudden absence could mean that he has finally gone back to his village in Puerto Rico, or his daughter has finally convinced him to come live with her in Hackettsville, or, that thing I don’t want to think about. Because I love to say good morning to him as much as I hope he loves to be smiled at, for us to bask in a flash of regard, to be present and gifted. I am missing that today.