My
brothers' people have gone away.
They
loaded their truck with conviction yesterday
and
left our street for some Godawful
dirt
town where their kids will play
with
sticks. They said they want it simple:
work
and church and babies. All
the
noise (They mean others lives
and
skins and money and how our sons fall
in
with their sons and with their daughters.)
was
too much. To them it was noise,
the
street music. There was one
uncle
lingering with dark, full eyes
who
said (hand on heart), “ I must find in
here
something as big as Babylon.”
He
should have stayed. Should have kept living
with
destitute men collecting littered tin
into
shopping carts on Saturday morning
and
the noise the neighbors are always making
and
the helicopters and the mummers.
With
the smell of injira cooking
just
there, eight feet across
the
alley. It is street music. Downstairs
the
mulatta angel and the Polish boy
hopscotch
and wait for our girls
to
join them. The neighbors begin to play
the
theme from Bolero loudly, repeatedly.
I
make coffee to carry down
to
the stoop. I look up and see
a
naked girl put her hair in a bun
through
a far, open window. She's gone
just
as suddenly. I laugh, gather
up
our mugs. We sit on the steps in the sun.
At
Market Street I watched my daughter,
age
five, trying to piece together
the
meaning of “Girls! Girls! Girls!”
in
blinking neon. She asks. I tell her,
then
take her hand and walk down Babylon's
mainstreet.
Every night there are gunshots.
Hasidim
mix with hipsters at the fishmarket
in
Chinatown where they will sell you eels
born
in the Euphrates. Too much here that
is
real for laws in books to keep straight
however
often they recite what is written.
My
pale, bookish brothers blink their exhausted
eyes
and find their Scripture too thin
a
veil to conceal the lovely body of everyone:
the
world. You can see from here where God
made
the tower we made together fall down.
We're
at it again. Did you hear that Spanish kid?
I
can understand most of what he said.
