Red,
Have you heard? How the National Guard’s occupied Pier 94? They’re all so young, the uniformed, and you should see the way they wave to us from behind the camouflage and concrete. It’s spooky, and one keeps forgetting to wear his government issued sunglasses. His eyes are so blue, Red, so bloodshot, like he’s been up all night crying, or groaning maybe, or begging his mother to stay inside.
This is wartime, Cuomo says, the opening of Spring. So we ride by everyday to check in, to wave back. We pull our mask down and try to smile.
But they’ve built brick walls around the community garden, Red, barred gates. We enter it beneath a series of tall stone arches. A sailboat wades in the green, white crests folding toward it, and the dirt path downhill shows a train extending north along the river.
There’s this shadowy figure standing below the blossom tree, a person, and a lone horse snacks on fallen apples by the fountain. This is like De Chirico, we think, these long evening shadows, they make no sense. The angles are militant, even, like this blue wind coming off the water, cold and meeting nothing.
Dusk, suddenly, and we find the figure is a woman. We say hello while staying distant, filling our basket with chrysanthemums for the table, with tomatoes and peppers and greens.
The woman is beautiful, we think, she’s barefoot. Her head is shaved and the fuzz growing back is golden. We like the pointed shape of her mask, the drape of lace pinned to it like curtain sway. A single red carnation is tucked behind her ear, and she’s dressed in long black robes. Quietly, like in a whisper, she says,
No, no, I’m a designer. Or I used to be. I came here to see the butterflies a minute, to contemplate all the vacancies. That’s my boat, she points, and now we understand.
I have a secret here, she says, but we need to hurry. A storm is coming.
We follow her shadow up some grassless knoll we’ve never seen, and behind a wall of vines there’s a field. It’s lined with sunflowers, and on the table is a styrofoam casting of a torso, a sundial, a potted fig tree, several black books. Low clouds roll above us, dark ones, but there’s this way she’s looking at us, Red. A way like saying, You have no idea, man. Come on. You have no idea.
So we ask her about the sundial.
How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them, she says, and yeah, we think she’s right. Like what we’ve read of war, how there’s actually no spring but an endless string of summers and winters. We show her our watch, how it’s still set to Mountain Time, and she laughs.
Then the bees remind us of the first boy we ever loved. His name was Eden, we tell her, he was an arsonist, a painter. We start to tell her how he died, but she says,
You should go now. It’s gotten very late and the storm is coming from the direction you came. Quick, here, take this book to remember me.
So we ride hard, Red, as hard as we ever have to beat the rain. At home Dolly is lighting candles, all the windows open, and while the red sauce simmers we drink our milk and watch rain fall on flowers in the window.
The air feels nice because of the water, and we find the word epiphyte, a name for orchids growing on tree trunks in tropical forests, in the woman’s black book of poems.
Dolly has condemned our reading by candlelight, citing all the blind poets like Homer and Borges and Milton, but before bed we reread a letter from our mother. A letter from before all this, a short note about how nice was Christmas, next let’s see Aruba, can’t wait to see you soon.
She asks about you still, Red, in nearly every letter. She misses you too.
Dyl