A Birthday Memorial to Seventh Street

I

I tarry in days shaped like the high staired street
where I became a woman
between two funeral parlors next door to each other
sharing a dwarf who     kept watch for the hearses
Fox's Bar on the corner
playing happy birthday to a boogie beat
Old Slavic men cough in the spring thaw
hawking     painted candles     cupcakes     fresh eggs
from under their dull green knitted caps
When the right winds blow
smells of bird seed and malt
from the breweries across the river
stop even our worst hungers.

One crosstown bus each year
carries silence into these overcrowded hallways
plucking madmen out of mailboxes
from under stairwells
cavorting over rooftops in the full moon
cutting short the mournful songs that soothed me
before they cascaded into laughter every afternoon
at four P.M.
from behind a door that never opened
masked men in white coats dismount
to take the names of anyone
who has not paid the rent
batter down the doors
to note the shapes of each obscenity
upon the wall
hunt those tenants down
to make new vacancies.

II

These were some of my lovers     processed
through the corridors of Bellevue     Mattewan
Brooklyn State     the Women's House of D.
St. Vincent's and the Tombs
to be stapled onto tickets for their one-way ride
on the unmarked train that travels
once a year     cross country east to west
filled with New York's rejected lovers
the ones who played with all their stakes
who could not win     nor learn to lie
we were much fewer then
who failed the entry tasks of Seventh Street
and were returned back home
to towns with names like Oblong and Vienna
(called Vyanna)
Cairo     Sesser     Cave-in-Rock     and Legend.

Once a year the train stops     unannounced
at midnight     just outside of town
returns the brave of Bonegap and Tuskegee
of Pawnee Falls and Rabbittown
of Anazine     Elegant     Intercourse
leaving them beyond the tracks
like dried-up bones sucked clean of marrow
rattling with citylike hardness
soft wood     petrified to stone in Seventh Street.

The train screams
warning the town of coming trouble
then moves on.

III

I walk over Seventh Street     stone at midnight
two years away from forty
the ghosts of old friends
precede me down the street in welcome
bopping in and out of doorways
with a boogie beat.

Freddie sails before me like a made-up bat
his Zorro cape level with the stoops
he pirouettes upon the garbage cans
a bundle of drugged delusions
hanging from his belt

Joan with a hand across her throat
sings     unafraid of silence anymore
and Marion who lived on the scraps of breath
left in the refuse of strangers
searches the gutter with her nightmare eyes
tripping over a brown girl
young in her eyes and fortune
nimble as birch     and I try to recall her name
as Clement comes     smiling     from a distance
his fingers raised in warning
or blessing     over us all.

Seventh Street swells into midnight
memory ripe as a bursting grape
my head is a museum
full of other people's eyes
like stones     in a dark churchyard
where I kneel praying
my children
will not die politely
either.