out the window v. III - I

May 2006

Now I look out there and it's shipping pallets piled up over rocks and dirt, discarded hardhats of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Blacks, the workers who yell at each other across steel beams and new-laid walls of brick; workers who don't know what was here before. Who, in the words of one supervisor to my landlord Bez, after being told that the runoff from the site was killing our garden, had not seen the lot before the digging began. Had not known of the pear tree and apple tree and flowers and high-grown grass, the meadow fertilized by (and a mask for) all the debris. There's construction everywhere in Brooklyn; four spots on my block, another large multi-story condo rise around the corner. So now I will have a normal view from my backyard; the M train will continue gliding by through day and night, the birds will rest on the top of the garage where Johnny Coast works on weekends, the Pentacostals will continue to belt their praise to funky drums and electric bass all Sunday and most weeknights, the tree, the one last tree, which grows on our side of the fence, will be bare for another couple of weeks and then it will bud and then it will blossom. And then it will shed, and the ground will be pink for days, before turning gray; gray like the rest of my view below the horizon, beyond the lovely brick that covers the back of our house, the garage, the church's chimney.

December 2005

94 years ago, Pennsylvania-born painter John Sloan did an oil called Pigeons. The coffee, in a cup I cling to like life support. Out the window shimmers a mist. The ground is completely soaked, though now the sun is with us and it makes the drizzle of early-morning rain illusionary. "This is not what you're seeing," says the rain, or, "Come out here and see for yourself." There is plenty to hear out the window. The rain grows harder. It splashes back up in the light, back towards the night from whence it came. The recent excavation of the adjacent lot has left an array of ladders, re-bar, and earth-moving paraphernalia. They dug out the frame of a foundation, leaving a massive ark of land in the middle, to be removed later. Indiana Jones would jump right in. On our side of the fence, in the failed garden, sits a chair. It faces me, the chair. What if I were to go out there? With a new pipe, and an umbrella perhaps, and go and sit in the chair to smoke and stare at the (for now) empty sky that's next to this house I still live in? Here come the sirens with their fire trucks and ambulances, the screaming of people and trains and steel rounding corners. And my trip to work is all laid out in a clear line, beginning with an exit from the opposite side of this house. The rear of this house I prefer, with all the brick and the train tracks and the bushy tree that for a few months of the warm season blossoms with feathery flowers that look like they belong to a woman's boa; furry flowers of pink and skin-tone, balls of soft color that fall to the ground in wisps and cover the concrete for days before they die. By September they disappear, just a few husks left that look like dead grass. Windows boarded up, I'll never know what's inside. Tenements tar-black and blood-red, laced with fire escapes and defunct chimneys, empty of the pigeons or children of John Sloan's 1910 painting. Where are the mischievous, black-flag waving youth, with their pigeons and suspenders and pointy hats? Gone out the windows of the twentieth century.

September 2005

Vans and fences. I don't need to look out there to know they're there. They've been there for years--years before I came here and I've been here two years already. Two years is the new nine months. The time passes, you get used to holidays marching in like a to-do-list, and only then do you realize another year has passed. But the fences. They shadow the weeds of my backyard and illuminate the wide empty lot adjacent to the property. Some of the lot is bordered by a three-story-high brick wall that was once part of a building. People, friends and visitors, ask me what that wall is all about, and I have no response, only that it is no longer connected to a building, just hides the junkyard around the corner, which is guarded by two loud Dobermans who howl and freak the piss out of my dog, who is only a foot tall when standing. The vans, the vans are parked in the body shop's lot which is behind the empty lot, our empty lot. Last year they opened the gate and deposited an entire Ford Taurus into the lot, where it stayed until spring, when the frost disappeared and all that remained were two bumpers and a pile of broken glass and shredded apolstery, which was soon swept up by community service, a squad of half-hearted workers we lovingly called the "chain-gang." The chain gang almost cut down our store of grape vines that snake along the unfinished picket fence that divides our yard from the wasteland. Grape vines that seem to come from the sky, a sky we can hardly see for all the thicket and bushy trees and lights from Manhattan and airplanes out to JFK or LaGuardia, whichever. Grapevines that bear quite the purple bounty by September, a bounty which I insisted to the community service foreman, or marshal, whatever you call him (maybe he was doing time as well) that we use them to make wine--at which point he immediately called, "Halt, stop all movement, leave those vines alone!" And I was suddenly in Cool Hand Luke, patronized by the spineless warden: "What we've got here is failure to communicate!" Etc, but he sure reached these people across the fence from me, who dropped their pruning shears immediately, grateful to leave a little work unfinished. I look out there at my neighbors, with their barbecues and bike club meetings, their manifestos ready to hatch, and I sit up here, at work, at home.