Subterranean
I. Toward the Natural History
Three sisters sit side-by-side-by-side, well groomed for Sunday church.
I wonder where their mother is?
Each girl is flaxen-blonde and wears patent leather shoes
that glint like those in Oz. Each one is playing parent with a doll:
one dressed in overalls ready for a square dance. A lithesome
plastic ballerina encircled by a pink tutu posed in a pleat.
Barbie in war fatigues outfitted for a tour of duty in Baghdad
or Kabul. With peach-and-cream complexions, these girls appear
as though they're headed to an Ivory Soap commercial.
A man in the adjoining seat wheezes
repetitiously—it sounds like chronic emphysema.
I have no choice except to listen.
He whispers, “you—be careful,” in my ear.
I certainly won’t look at him or query for elaboration.
Is he a vigilante or insane or just another harmless recluse seeking
liberation in the fetid air?
One stop past Columbus Circle, the blessed trio vanished.
I didn’t see them rise and leave as the car filled up with Yankee’s caps
and bundled strollers. Only two more stops
until the Planetarium. Should I stand and walk into
another car? Be still, I tell myself, maintain your focus,
glancing at the strip ads for STANLEY KAPLAN courses,
the GED in Spanish, institutes for long-haul truckers
and future cosmetologists. His bulk presses in
on me. His halitosis makes me gag.
His bulbous head reminds me of Serrano ham
with eyes. I watch his cosmic gaze transfixed on nothing I can see,
unless his occupation is conversing with the dead.
II. Underground Music
Guitarists from Argentina, Cuba and the Cameroon, instruments
with just one string or two
that twang and weep, evoke
past loves
to chill the blood.
A Brooklynite blows Charlie Parker.
Two couples dance a polka, dapper
in embroidered vests.
I have nowhere I must be, no pressing
destination.
Another modern Orpheus
entranced
by the current of her scent.
She reads a Balzac paperback with a Degas bather on the cover
as if we’d met in a long ago lost hour.
Black cowboy boots, a floppy red felt hat,
a guitar case strapped to her back. Her mast, I think.
In a moment, she’ll sail off
on my pilfered breath.
One drummer
from Burundi, one drummer from Senegal,
Peruvians with wooden flutes summoning
macaws from rain-soaked jungles.
Other phyla soon arrive:
A barbershop quartet of rats, and a frazzled artist
whose moniker is Cockroach, his carapace a French beret.
A stout man in an alpine suit taps his boot to cold cement as he swoons
with his accordion.
A white-gloved Michael Jackson clone and a troupe of break dance acrobats
wind their paths
in between the “Wet Paint” columns.
I wish I could follow her and not look back,
find myself reborn
inside her Cobble Hill apartment,
the music of old plumbing as we ran the bath.
It’s grace that haunts me as I wait
never having learned to flow,
except in some pen-push rage at the solitary desk.
This task seems too arduous:
become
an original upon the surface.
Like others here I fled and went below
to strum and croon and bop
for a moment’s admiration
and a guitar case strewn with dollars.
Gaunt hipsters and grizzled folkies stand beneath
these filthy L train stairs to serenade Kurt Cobain,
John Lennon, and Joe Strummer.
Earthly life is
Hell’s disguise for those who choose
this realm instead.
No skinhead metal, no gangsta’ beats, no nihilistic grooves—
only harp and gamelan, dulcimer and didgeridoo.
III. The Horizontal Fires
Level by level I descend
to the sound of clanging metal.
Steel doors open and I enter
and ride what seems like hours
in a landscape without weather.
No guide except a map enclosed
in glass like a transparent body
from Gray’s Anatomy, rivulets
of arteries and veins. The signal
on my cell phone to the world
above gone dead. I walk from car
to car to gaze upon this afterlife
they’ve led—chained to metal poles
and handrails and left to beg.
I wouldn’t claim the journey
One car of upright sleepers
seems at peace until I witness
how they’re shocked awake
once-a-minute, as nightmares passed
from brain to brain.
In a car smeared with graffiti
the inhabitants are mostly poets and
their critics who mutter to themselves,
while others read identical newspapers
with a front page photo of an ice-encrusted skyscraper
and the headline: ARMAGEDDON!
I continue forward secretly protected.
Biggie’s ghost infusing me with hip-hop
wagger. When I reach the front car—
it’s apparent—the train has no conductor,
so I climb into the driver’s vacant chair where
I behold a bright metropolis modeled upon heaven,
this chariot surging in between the dual necklines
of the bridge strung with arcs of pearls. Relentless wheels
in their course, sparking above the ice-chunked river.
IV. In the Church of Fading Voltage
Gazing down the platform at 5th and 53rd the tunnel lights illuminate
each nook and niche where wooden saints once stood with missing hands
and severed heads. Deserted shrines where candles burn upside-down
and disembodied prayers are hollowed out by grinding metal.
Now the sole inhabitants are monk-brown rodents, scurrying to sermons
across the grease-black rails within this church of fading voltage. A train arrives.
I hide my face behind the gossip pages of the Post. I stand beside a man
with a giant sequined crucifix suspended from his neck and ferret furred
along his shoulder. We surge past midnight platforms nearly empty
except for crumpled pages of Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Metro Cards
without a ride left. Inside these jangled cars, above 125th, clowns
and necromancers suddenly appear, nomadic healers hawking pelts
and claws, tortoise shells, teeth and glands in vials.
“TB, Eboli, HIV, which is your disease?” A sickly child asks, tugging
at my sleeve. “You’ll really need those Gucci loafers even when you’re dead?”
Lead me out from where I am, Beatrice from Riverdale, Hermes from Canarsie.
Extract these jittered nerves; forge these dreaded wheels into enduring stars.
And here upon this rusted nail hang a dawn-light lantern.
Peter Marcus | Two Mirrors from the End of Autumn
Contents | Mudlark No. 55 (2014)