When I turn to look back again the glass is crazed with reflection, and all the people inside are obscured by bright sun, cloud speed, flashing cars. I don't mind missing that last last look because already I am feeling amputated, outside here in the concrete, I don't want to cry.

The wait for the train feels impossibly long and when I board I look down at the feet of the woman sitting across from me. In that moment they are the most beautiful thing in the world. Ropy, tired, slid back in cheap flip-flops, shuffling through Saturday afternoon discards of chip bags, cookie wrappers, paper cups.

It is the end of a week of seaming, of surging. I wouldn't trade it for these hours of loss, they are, in their own way, the best possible thing.

(more time lost in the DMZ that is tech support and I still don't have the ability to write from home. So I am cannibalizing myself. Apologies. And my thoughts to those of you in SoCal DMZ of your own.)

The phone buzzes me at 2 am. It's trying to send me a message. I already have one this evening from the man I imagine in some loud dark place, his thumbs numb from the house's attempt to knock him down, it says, simply, "lots." I delete it to make room for whatever is coming through next.

Back in bed I am stroking the rump of this pillow, thinking it could almost be what I want, if it were bigger, if it breathed, if it had freckles, if there were a bone under this curve.

I saw that musician on the train again, the one with the broken teeth, the ruined voice, guitar strapped to his front, amp and car battery strapped to his back. He is playing the same way, a watery, warbling nod out, so slow you could drive a mule train through the space between each note, he's knock knock knockin on heaven's door. I am trying not to cry, I give him a dollar.

Sunday in the park we are lying on our backs in the grass, feeling the earth turn under a pair of Bloody Marys. The soccer players are kicking up a scrim of dust, picked out by the lowering sun. On the other side of the field the moon is coming up, facing off and beating the sun into retreat. That would mean it's fall, more than anything, and the chill coming down the hills says it's time to go home.

the smaller but perhaps most stubborn part of it

she died in police custody at an airport holding facility. my initial instant reaction, is that the tox report will be the illumination. It is a family of high-powered, high-strung New Yorkers. It must have been hard to live with those demands, and I can imagine the round top of the prescription bottle looking like an escape hatch, sighing it open to that release.

the next day they admit she was heading into rehab. alone. they must have been so ashamed, so furious. she must have been so ashamed, so furious, her final flight across the concourse darting and weaving like a bird trapped indoors, until she is netted by security.

I wonder if her credit card receipts will show a final swill at an airport bar, an onlooker in the women's room will tell of a final gulping of obliteration with hands cupping water at the sink, holding room surveillance tapes reveal the animal need to escape so powerful as to dislocate one's own shoulder.

Here is money, and power, and position, and choice, and none of it used well. I think of the people I work for, who are broke, and invisible, and confused by a set of circumscriptions that were never meant to provide any comfort. I am not sure how to define tragedy.

I brought home a centerpiece from the gala last night, and this morning, waiting for the espresso maker’s final belch and hiss of steam, I let my eyes go play over the flowers. It’s all in the red family, orchids, dahlias, ranunculus, tulips, cyclamen. The roses are velvet soft and matured and lushed open to the size of salad plates. There is a kind of recumbent lily I have never seen before, flushed with uppers, fiery red with a searing edge of yellow, the petals are peeled back like they are screaming speed itself. Combine that with a blissful full night’s sleep and a spine-bending latte, and this day is looking mighty promising.

Out of the subway you can feel the cold front moving in, the air whipping and cooling. I want to move down the sidewalk with a little dance in my step, eschew a fast plastic-wrapped croissant at Sammy’s for the fancy place, with the real, fresh pastry and an eye-popping coffee for later on. Waiting in line I eye flirt with a curly-headed little boy, who peek-a-boos me with his red fireman’s helmet. He coos, I dance, and I could do this all day if I didn’t have to beat the rain to my office. The girls behind the counter ring me up, and it’s time to go.

My co-worker asks me if I want anything from the store. “Two hours of sleep, please.” I came home on Tuesday night to a notice taped to my front door. It was from DEP, letting me know they were turning off my water the next morning for repairs, and giving me dire warnings about what might happen if I didn’t turn off my water main, refill my boiler with cold water, flush my taps, etc. So I rolled and tossed all night, anticipating a 6AM call to my plumber, and wondering what would happen if I couldn’t get hold of him, and what might happen to my building’s plumbing, and how would I get the main turned back on, and where the hell is it anyway, and generally making myself miserable.

It wound up not being a big deal. Although I did have to go get a long-handled screw-driver to use as a cheater bar to turn the tired valve. Thank you to the guy who said “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I could lift the world” and thank you to my tired brain, even if I can’t remember his name, I remember the application.

Determined to sleep long and hard last night I went out and had three fancy martinis with dinner. I paid for two, the bartender slid me the third. That should have done the trick, or at least I was hoping it would, as this particular concoction was called “Esperanza,” but for the cab drivers arguing outside my window at 4.30AM, starting a set of pancake hours that lasted until I got up in disgust at 7.30.

Tonight is our annual gala, my opportunity to serve the wealthy and examine them up close. I kid you not, last year we auctioned off a diamond tiara. That had been owned by Adele Bloch-Bauer, yeah, you know her, that one, who commissioned her portrait by Klimt. Perhaps after working 14 or 15 hours straight I will sleep through the night.

All this to say, even though I have things to say, I’m not in lyrical mode.

47th Street, 6PM

It’s closing time in the diamond district, the shop windows are in various stages of undress. Some are still seductively lit and fully stocked with pretty, some are stripped clean, leaving only their velvet beds behind, some are in the middle of their vanishing act, disembodied hands reaching around backer boards to pluck at the stars and put them away for the night. Mirroring the goods pooling in quiet vaults behind the storefronts, the diamond merchants are collecting out in the street.

In between nodes of idling armored trucks, a sidewalk vendor is trying to push the last of his stock. He is thin as a blade of grass as he leans over to rearrange his fruit. He is trying to sell the virtues of his wares to a trio of men in dark suits. “I’ve never been fat!” he exclaims, and I can see in his sunken chest and shabby clothes that is more out of poverty and necessity than anything else. “But you’ve always been ugly!” says one of the businessmen, and they laugh, impressed with themselves, the difference between their product and his. The vendor looks down and I look away, into the face of another diamond merchant, lounging in a doorway. He hisses something at me, the only word I understand is “nice.” I am not sure if he is offering something valuable to me, or offering to take something valuable from me. I want none of it, I keep heading towards the subway.

805 Michaels

I’m back. I know I am back because they start road work at 7 am, enormous mechanical teeth tearing through Fulton Street, making my building, my bed, the skin between my hipbones vibrate. I know I am back because I am stepping over a smoldering cigarette butt rolling on the begummed sidewalk, inching down the subway platform from a man who, if he ever was adequately medicated, surely is not right now.

In my email box at work, there are things of greater and lesser importance. Deadlines are being changed, a new policy for housing homeless families, new zoning for providing services to the elderly. The New York City Department of Health wants me to know that in the most recent year with complete data, 805 Michaels were born.

They have not turned the heat on in my office yet, fall weather is corkscrewing its way in, going down and doubling back over and over, so I go for a walk at lunchtime to warm up. There is a long line at the bank and thin music scratching to cover that fact and I keep thinking about 805 Michaels and this city and its too-little, too-much, prickle-backed elbow-wrestling can have its 805 Michaels if I can stand near my one, even if it means I have to go all the way across the country to do it.

I live alone. Several months ago I became aware of when in the day I spoke my first words out loud, to whom they were spoken. “Good morning!” to Mr. K, rolling up the security gates at the corner pharmacy. “Thank you,” to Sammy as he hands over the change from my croissant. Sometimes when I wake up, I will say a word into the still air, just to make sure that sweetness is the first thing in my mouth that day. One morning this week I said “I love you” and when I asked a friend what he had said, he replied “Cat puke” which, in my context, made me laugh until I snorted.

I am invited, again, to the Holocaust survivors’ for Thanksgiving. This is painfully sweet, since I am the one who first insisted on dropping this happy bomb on them, and I still do nearly all of the cooking, but their pride makes it have to be their offer to me. Thinking about it today on the train, what this gift means, I get the nearly subsuming desire to drop to my hands and knees, press my forehead to something, in supplication, in gratitude.

He said his corner of California is the most beautiful place on earth, but I think the inside of my head is. Last night’s rain swirl and headlights turned that man’s raincoat into a monk’s saffron robes. The harsh lighting on the bus took the woman walking down the aisle, turned a take-away dinner tin swathed in white plastic into a halo in her hand, held out like an offering. This morning I say his name so it will be the first, the magnet, the aggregator of what this day holds.

It’s a day when I am going to be distracted anyway. There are guys hanging off a scaffold outside my office window all day. It’s 85 degrees and humid as a monkey’s armpit. At the end of the week I will again be chasing light to the west coast, beating a path to what comes next. And so I am very susceptible to Dr. S’ vision of knife-wielding doughnuts. Truly, the Disney track intruded all day with doughnuts behaving in unsusual ways. Doughnuts crouching behind dumpsters, waiting for a mark. Doughnuts tying off before their fix. Doughnuts with wings flying over the Lower East Side projects. Doughnuts exploding like fireworks in the night time sky. All with beatific blissful doughnutty smiles on their icing faces.

So I go to the gym after work, and my friend is late in meeting me. That’s OK, because now I can cartoon those doughnuts. I take out my drawing pad and am doodling all the things you would not want to see a doughnut wielding: a chain saw; a hypodermic needle; a switch blade; a hacksaw. Then I start in on the inappropriate doughnut behavior, hopped up doughnuts, menacing doughnuts. When my friend arrives she asks what I am doing and I start barking with laughter “I’m drawing doughnuts having sex!” Look at my pad, it’s true. An éclair is having it’s way with a cake doughnut, and they are both looking pretty happy.

Sugar Bomb

It’s steamy enough out to be August again, sultry and wet. My computer is choking on some half-digested ort of information and needs to re-boot so I head out for a walk while it grinds. Landmines have been going off in my office all week and the staff have been diving to cover. They deserve a happy Friday sugar bomb, so I am going for doughnuts. Not your crappy Dunkin or box-o-Entenmann’s best if eaten by 2025, not your bullshit Sex-and-the-City cupcakanista so-over-it buttercream rosebuds. Nope, this is the good stuff, the cushy Cadillac blonde, the spiky high school tart who would never have looked at you, your older sister’s best friend’s ass wiggling to the Top 40 countdown as they sunbathe in the backyard. Yeah, that good, but totally attainable. I’ve got to let my hair down for this, let it ride over my shoulders, let the light hit me as I push it one step further and go for gritty, spine-popping, do-you-think-I’m-not-serious? coffee.

The street is blocked off so that’s the way I’m going, the flashing lights on the cruiser a beacon. People are hurrying down the street, and as I turn the corner I hear singing. In the space in the road between the Young Israel double crumbling tenements and the Bialystoker Home for the Aged a group of men are dancing, holding torahs to their chests, mazel tov, mazel tov is what I can hear, and I don’t know whether this is an annual take your torah to work day, or that thing they do when you move it from one place to another, or the happy hoo-hah that happens when you get a new one, but people are pulled up all over and watching, spilling out from stoops and bodegas and the illegal underground won-ton rolling outfits that reek of rotting cabbage.

Here comes Knobs, too, rolling a shopping cart down the sidewalk and we head-bob from across the wide avenue. He’s too busy to stop and so am I. We both have our missions to fulfill, but I know, and he knows too, that the next time we meet on this sidewalk, this everyone’s living room, this public church, this graving yard, I will give him a smile like a flash bomb and be so thrilled to do it.

Her nose is a knobby fingerling potato, and her face is a repetition of that form, in the cheekbones, the chin, the browbone angling from her forehead. It’s a little repellant, but also fascinating, and I have to keep looking. The features outline hard or soften as she moves her head under the harsh subway fluorescents, each bone looks impossibly dimensional, 3 ½ D. I think she is beautiful, perhaps barely a little more beautiful than ugly, no, perhaps slightly more ugly than beautiful, as she turns her face and it is different by increments.

I wonder what it would be like to wake up with that face, to have it on the pillow beside you, to examine it in the early morning with the only movement her breathing. She is talking to her companion, and when she laughs, she throws her hand to her face. There is one tiny diamond set into a band on her finger, someone has already thought about what she is like.

I look at my own hand. The cuticle bitten to blood in absent-minded irritation, the ring I wear on my right hand. The ring has a name, given to it in a dream where someone pointed to it, asked “what is it called?” like it was important enough, precious enough, to have its own appellation like the Koh-i-noor or the Hope. I said, “Disappointment.”

His daughter is singing to herself and swinging her feet in her stroller, in line next to me at the grocery store. He begs my indulgence for her, taking up a tiny bit of extra space, intruding. But she is completely charming, and I tell him so. Returning to our conversation this morning I am thinking, why doesn’t bacon have polka dots? And that sounds like the first line in a children’s book, but I haven’t thought of the next line, yet.

It’s back-to-school on the train. Half of everyone is cramming for their first class of the day, highlighters and fuzzy-edged paperbacks clutched close. The woman in front of me is reading Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth” and “The Iliad” has been making quite a showing recently. I think the guy over there with shaggy hair falling into his eyes is reading Robert Heinlein by choice, but the young man who looks like he’d be more at home with El Diario is spending quality time with the Wall Street Journal and b-boy is chewing through the New York Times for his current affairs assignment.

I hit the office and it hits me back, loosening a tooth and making me lose the words I had organized in my head, shuffled together as an offering. He said he was not hip, and I wanted to say it’s not about being hip, it’s about being curious, but I did not figure that out until later. The watercolor illustration of a bear juggling fruit open on my dining table. The insistent vines shooting over my window bars, greening the light at the back window. The stunted strawberry plant that I continued to water all spring, all summer, that finally has sent forth a single blossom now in the cooling fading days. I need more time, I need more time, even though I only allowed myself to sleep last night when it hurt to keep my eyes open.

He indicates that she should get on the train before him. It’s a courtly gesture, inspired, I’m sure, by her tiny cut off shorts baring the length of her smooth legs. I’m admiring her thighs too, it’s hard not to, when I notice that they run into calves that are several inches too short. It’s a feeling not unlike suddenly running off the road. You are going along there, and then suddenly, there is simply not enough to go on. Perhaps she has them so exposed to over-compensate, or to just put it out there and make you deal with it. That would be in keeping with her tattoo, a wristwatch of “Brooklyn” in gothic script.

That would be useful if you were drunk and needed to tell the cabdriver where to go. I can imagine thrusting it through the scratched plexi partition, a soundless demand to take me here. Otherwise, I would find it hard to forget, or at least, I don’t need to be reminded that I have already pledged my allegiance, found a home here in this raucous brawl of a place, when it still brawled and was raucous. I pledged my allegiance every time I wrote my name on a deed, first for a box of air, then finally for the actual soil, the hard-packed dirt at the cellar floor of my house. Pledged my allegiance every time I swept up after a Friday night that wanted more than it could contain without exploding into slash, glass, glassine envelopes. And every Saturday morning on the stoop with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, nodding at neighbors and the get-along of daylight activities.

I could get a tattoo of Brooklyn inked to my wrist, but perhaps better would be to my shoulder, so you can see it as you come up behind me, decide how you want to close that distance. Take that as a warning, a magnet, an advertisement, take it as you will. You deal with it.