Snow Was General All O'er Ireland...

On the eve of our first real snowfall of the season, from possibly the single best piece of short fiction ever written in the English language:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

-- from "The Dead" by James Joyce, in Dubliners

Cassandra's monologue from "Going Home"

When I first moved to New York, in the early eighties, I lived for a while in a renovated Old Law (dumbbell) tenement in Chelsea. My next-door neighbor was a late middle-aged woman who had been living, for years, in the un-renovated tub-in-kitchen version of my apartment. She was usually very nice, but was sometimes given to loud one-sided aggressive declaratory conversations with Jesus in the wee hours of the morning. I later learned that she suffered from schizophrenia, and was always one disability check away from being out on the street. At the time, rapacious New York landlords were emptying SRO buildings through any means that they could find, fair and foul, and were often "warehousing" the empty buildings until the market turned in their favor.

One day, I read in the News the sad story of a little girl on the Lower East Side who had been playing beneath the stoop of her building and was killed when the stoop collapsed on top of her. She was a very well-loved child and the neighborhood was very tight. It was one of those moments in a neighborhood, a much smaller version of the General Slocum disaster from eighty years before, when you could practically hear a collective keening arise from scores of kitchens where mothers were cooking dinner, empty lots where kids were playing stoop-ball and in Tompkins Square Park where she was memorialized by sad-eyed men.

This was the first thing that I ever wrote for an actor, and it was given wonderful voice by the late Rosanna Carter of the Negro Ensemble Company.

Scene: The doorway of a former SRO tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York. CASSANDRA, a black homeless woman of indeterminate age, stands at the foot of the stoop with two large paper bags at her side packed with all of her earthly possessions blocking the steps. She addresses PAUL [an actor who has taken a job as the super of an empty tenement building in the process of being renovated].

CASSANDRA

You think I don’t know you? You live here now, in this building, don’t you? You like it? You think it’s built solid, do you? I’m here to tell you. You best be saying your prayers ‘fore you go to sleep at night, ‘cause this building’s liable to fall down any moment.

[beat] You moving away. You think I’m out my mind, don’t you? You sure as hell don’t know me. But I know you.

You read in the paper, sometimes, see on the TV, about some old building fallin' down somewheres. Always seems to be in East New York, South Bronx, Lower East Side... one of them poorer neighborhoods, don't it? Why you spose that be?

What?

Just cause they old? No, chile. I'll tell you why. Old buildings be a lot like old people. They be storing up memories and souls since the day they be built. Souls of everyone who ever lived there. Every gal who give birth over some tub inna kitchen 'cause she be too poor to afford a doctor. Every old man who pass on in his sleep with a bottle in his hands 'cause he don't got no good reason to get up no more. And every little thing that happen in between.

After a while, see, the weight of all them souls starts to press down on the walls, press down on the floors, until something just give way.

No suh. Old buildings don't fall down for no reason at all. Not in these neighborhoods. They collapse from the weight of all the souls they got in 'em, all the life they've seen.

Oh, I know you well enough. You the one they hire to watch this old building they "warehousing" like you say. You the one holdin' the keys. It be getting cold for November. Now, will you let me in my home?

- from Going Home ©1989 Peter Basta Brightbill

Crossing Fulton Ferry from Fly Market to Iphigenia, suspended in the great grey arms of the Manhattan Bridge. The sun glints off the Harbor, reflecting desire, as the City of Aspiration gathers her breath in anticipation.

Flatiron Elegy (1996)

This morning, upon leaving the shelter,
Bundled in my trenchcoat against the early morning chill,
I was greeted by the sight of snow flakes falling out of the blackness,
sepia in the halogen streetlights,
an old TV commercial on a black-and-white set,
dimly remembered;
hardly anyone else on the street at that hour,
not even the cabs.

I had fully intended to go straight home.
A warm bed, and she, asleep,
who tells me that she never recalls her dreams.
But then, out of the corner of my eye,
I caught a glimpse of a shadow wearing a blue trenchcoat and carrying a bright yellow umbrella, and I am compelled to follow.

As I reach the corner of Fifth and Sixteenth,
before me, across the Avenue, the wind dislodges a huge drift from atop a roof and
the shadow figure disappears into the swirl of snow
Leaving me standing before the loft
Where I met you on a summer evening more than a dozen years ago
Before you took me, nine years too late, back to Williamsburg
And to your bed.
I had caught you, that second time, on the cusp:
You had just quit dance and the bed of your lover after many years.

The snow falling through the streetlight on the avenue
Casts a flickering white light on a window full of Victorian Christmas cards:
Inside, cherubs watch over children, all rose and ivory,
Who sit seated round a hearth, expectation on their faces.
Stockings, lumpy with coal or candy, hang from the mantle;
Candles flicker against the window panes.
Outside, the night, a cold black void.
Somewhere Saint Nick is lost in the empyrean
and Wee Willie Winkie makes his insistent rounds
tolling the hour for children long since departed.

I am shaken from my reverie by a clump of snow from above.
I look around for the thrower,
but the street is empty. The dead outnumber the living at that hour.
I look up.
Above me, a bare-breasted caryatid smiles down at me knowingly
with your smile as I emerged from the shower off the kitchen
at your place in Brooklyn, and found that you had hidden my clothes and my towel,
and were seated at the table discussing art and dance and fungi
with your roommates,
leaving me to skulk naked behind them against the wall
and mouth mock-curses at you over their heads.
And you, at your coffee,
one breast peeking from beneath your silk wrap,
mischief in your eyes and that knowing smile on your lips,
but did not give me away.

We had come to each other the night before without words,
joined flesh, locked eyes to souls as you came.
And I saw in such depths the pain and transgressions
of a young girl, but did not look away until you, at last,
averted your own gaze.
Afterwards, I cradled you while you wept,
brushed salty tears from your eyelashes with my lips.
Still later, you asked me why I had continued to love you
for all of those years?
An impossible question, I thought:
How do you describe falling in love with art and a girl in the same moment?
The air in my mouth grew heavy, my tongue flailed against it.
I finally stammered that it had to do with
your being a dancer.
But I am no longer, you said, and you turned away.

More snow from above. I look up.
The bare-breasted stone nymph now wears the trickster’s visage.
Pygmalion gazing at Galatea
I start to mutter a prayer beneath my breath, then think better of it.
“Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.”
Pygmalion at the altar of Venus, afraid to utter the name of his beloved.

I steady myself against the stone, set one foot before the other,
start to walk away,
up Fifth Avenue towards the Flatiron Building and the Park,
balm for an aching soul.
The domes and spires of the old buildings,
lit by floodlights from below, appear and disappear in time,
cut off by the swirling snow from their much-altered street facades.
On the Avenue it is the late 20th century
but in the sky the past holds reign:
Steichen and Stieglitz just around the corner. I keep looking up.

At 22nd Street the the sinuous curves of the Flatiron Building
Suddenly materialize out of a black shadow behind the snow.
Hello, old friend.
I briefly consider running back to my apartment to grab my camera.
Time, however, is fleeting.
Though it is still quite dark the longer I delay
the greater the likelihood that I will have lost this moment of darkness and light
by the time I return.
It’s that old dilemma: wanting to record something of moment
without disturbing the experiencing of it.

I decide against the trip
And instead cross 23rd Street to the Toy Center.
Across Fifth Avenue, in the park the star at the top of the war memorial
glows softly for the lost doughboys trying to find their way home from the Argonne Forest.
I wish that I knew a tenth of what it has seen.
Behind it, the clock on the campanile burns incandescent from the 1930’s.
Six fifteen: It will be getting light soon.

I head instead to a local diner for
a cup of coffee and warm hash browns.
It is only when I am inside that I realize how wet and cold I am.
Another early morning, three a.m.:
The rain beats against the panes of your window.
In the corner, your space heater sputters and casts an infernal glow.
Sadly deflated, my cock has withdrawn into me
and each of us, into ourselves,
We lie facing away from each other.
I will hear you swallowing throughout the early morning hours.
Dawn cannot come too soon.

The potatoes are without taste. I reach for the salt shaker.
It’s the Morton Salt girl making semaphore signals with her umbrella.
When it rains, it pours.

© 1996, Peter Basta Brightbill

Survivors

I raise small questions: Can time arc backwards? Does love live on?

In some tiny antechamber of my soul it will always be not-quite-dawn.

I did not know these things then:

that my hands on your flesh were his hands instead,
that my tender words of succor were his seduction as well.

Oh, that a father's love could beget a daughter's hell.

Three of us, that night, lying in the bed

two of us dying, the other never-quite-dead.

©1998 Peter Basta Brightbill