Alejandro Crawford
 

Cat in Glass
 
 
 
 
 

My City   The best thing about my city is that you can talk to people you don’t know as if they were your mother. Holding   What does it mean to possess a thing?  My city, where you can talk to those you do not know better than you can your friends – because they don’t sit beside your head in judgment,   they don’t put fish hooks in your chest, they don’t care about your cap except as a hat on someone they met in a falafel shop,   the way they would care about a pucker in the concrete, or one of the splotches of shoe-sole black that my brother claims are the gum of the ages flattened down by walking.   Cat in Glass   Why should the look of a place matter so much?    I know that the pre-planned surfaces are a thrill of muted chokehold resentment, that of holding them within my stomach, as if the gauzy googojuisjjjjjjjjjjjsesediment would not ooze out;   but I forget that the sash of colors is a beauty of breath. An arrangement of lines one wants to capture; bright net I’ve been waiting for while my own overlaid in thick and seething friction, or else silent muted indigestion; behind choices of light fantastic I have deeply longed to know.   And I may own your beauty as I own a cat in a cage of glass, I may use you as a brace around my wrist, I may eat of your wide kitchen like a suckling child, but still I do not know what I really want to know.   I want to know your beauty the way I own my home: to see my self in yards of stone and broken figments’ glass. Broken Out   Architecture is the art we live in, my brother says.   It does not ask who I am, I, in love with the architecture nobody designed, I, in love with your faces that I see only for a minute, the way the store fronts stagger, the warm lines of the traffic lights,   the plastic covered flowers of the Korean delis whole clean counters lined with all packed treats you could want, halvah and sesame, Cliff Bars and Tiger’s Milk   or the people I meet like pimples in the city’s skin –   I love meeting people this way because their openness is a link in a chain: one link doesn’t have to understand the other, it need know nothing of it, though together they could not  have failed to be;   I don’t know why I prize the indeterminate connections above all others,   is it because they are made without my choice? Selections are heavy because I take them like medicine; but I love the way you come down like dirty rain.  Thin Diamonds   I seek out connections made with people by surprise.  Continual surprise is what I seek!  And what you give, I am looking for directions that reveal themselves like grit in the pores of your cheeks, in the thin diamonds on each side of your nose, here there can be found priceless particles of dirt, these are the people you find in restaurants that are open in the middle of the night. Real Lemon   “Only the blue light of Buenos Aires has been my friend.”  I know what Borges meant (though he said otherwise) and I know what you mean, that I fail wildly, but there is something that builds up inside me the way I am told lava rises in the mountain’s core. You see I love the people and the secret light I greet when the city has begun to glow, the way I remember kitchens glowing when I was young, my father making eggs on an old kitchen counter with a sheet of metal around its edge, what could be more beautiful than glass bottles of Goya, plastic bottles of RealLemon, Shava tahini cans, and Corva water, on top of an old Pepsi machine, captain’s clock above it! and family pictures backlit by the picture of the Pepsi,   it is strange how I love these lines; the iron wrought Muslim lamp with a cupola fallen over to the right.   Regular   The people I live with don’t love the way I do, it seems their love is bordered ‘round, it seems their love is regulated like chlorine levels in a pool it seems their love has restraint, unlike mine. I Learned That on Broadway   Like a Montessori kid with his barrel of salt, I pour my feelings from one side to the other; but you’ve heard that from me before.   What I need to tell you tonight, with “special emphasis,” like a feverish character in a Russian novel, is –   but the thoughts forget each other like bubbles subsumed in a tub, take each other over into their own moving circles,   What is it? Does it have to do with these Australian drunk guys telling Yusef: “speak English,” though he and Mohammed have run this place in this neighborhood for twenty-odd years?   Drunk with proud prerogative, gesturing to the woman at the table next to me, with the pride of an imperial, “buae nos dee-ass, senorida! –   Ha!” “– I learned that   from West Side Story;”   it has to do with the fact that I have nothing in common with any of them both nothing and everything, I am a gutter flowing down below the uneven curb where they walk, that bit of water whose flow is both connected to the people, and unknown to them or to the street that turns light and dark with each pair of headlights and a bit of red from the hanging Rite Aid sign.

  (c)Alejandro Crawford 2004