I do not know when I lost my way

It must have been that tricky hairpin curve
back in my 9th winter.
Old Orchard became a road forking off North Avenue     which made no sense, was dream logic.

Old Orchard existed in the neighborhood after divorce.
Our lives became miniaturized
locus Northfield behind Roosevelt Elementary school, red brick. Concentrated like a thermometer's
mercury.

It took hours in my dream getting free:
crossing small streets and dangerous thoroughfares
always looking for the bright neon sign of the Roxie for weathervane, landmark.

I passed an old man asleep in a metal chair by a church.
Another dozing by a child's swing.
On a dead-end, near an empty elevator shaft & bank of buildings that turned out to be a nail factory

I was almost set on fire by a night watchman brandishing torch in my face.
Had I been 12 & not 9 I would have taken
the cigarette the old woman at the kiosk offered but I was just a child
the knife having slit my dress (There was no screen of brick wall between):

       causing me to look down put my hand to my mouth
       and scream Orozco's silent scream.

There was a fire in the greenroom

After thundering applause,
When you & I, sister, returned we found rubble of charred music scores,
the three bouquets of American Beauty roses you'd been given a cross between ash & soaked thorns.

I reached into your pocket
took a cigarette
lit up.

In my dream of looting,
Locals were pillaging things laid a hundred years before.

       The room itself was beyond repair. Ticket stubs, horsehair from bows.
Late-breaking news announced, however,
       that you were giving a command performance in morning
       a benefit      to rebuild the greenroom: in the stairwell.
We went to the little deli outside Carnegie to eat pencil-thin fish in the frosty dawn.
       You'd crack the crystal     craze silence by eight in an icy New York City morning.

We came into what used to be a courtyard

Rave reviews. Everything changed including you & me.

An old woman was refashioning ceramic carvings of swords and cannons.

Why were you pensive? What secrets did you withhold?

You braided & unbraided your fingers.

You peered at me as though lip-reading.

I flash back to when we two were children on a southbound train:       Broken links.

Misery was always trained south
harmony north.

You drop your cigarette and grind it out with the heel of your boot.

You remind me of a European actress.
When you smile I see the flash of one silver filling.
You won't touch whiskey
for the longest time my hand shook when I took a second one.

There were times when I handed you a chapter I'd written
& felt I wandered off into a snowstorm.

Times when I saw notes of dust swirl around your dark head in a primary school classroom

So much of our histories apart we had not filled in
but on nights like this, razor-sharp, I am keen in saturated colors, that we can.

Wind blows rain thru the window

It is Seoul. You will soon concertize in Korea
and have in Japan.

What do I know of these places? There is the sound of bicycles & it rains all the time.

At eighteen, in the middle of the night, you fled the apartment for Harlem.

Mother threw the valise at you as she had at our father.
Cinder blocks of lights were just flickering on          like those in basket-boats in Vietnam

The streets were almost deserted
the downpour kept pushing itself thru my open window

soaking my hands reminded me of the morning I decided I would follow you uptown to Harlem:
Both of us neon in our eyes rinsing them Magyar-green.

—Lynn Strongin

 

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