Making Book

I am 22, and just married,

and we are at my parents,

still on Clinton Avenue.

The hallways smell of pee

from behind the street floor

stairs and wool gloves,

crusted with slush, drying

on the radiator, it's clanging

and throbbing like a spirit

in the brassy gloom--one

small, high bulb that glows

under the blackening and teary

veils of tarnish, like a distant

halo, in the golden wall

of mail-boxes, their small doors

bent away from the locks

and loose on their hinges

and letting in into the darkness

spidery , faint filigrees

of light. My uncle, now up

from Florida--where he banked

a night for the syndicate in jail--

and Hialeah and the dogs--

back and forth after the war,

and always smiling when he comes

to see his poor schnook of a brother

with no guts to clip from a till

and get himself the hell out

of the East Bronx--offers

us a lift, wearing a gray fedora

and a tie, across town,

then in his smart topcoat,

right in the middle of the road,

turns off his motor and leaves

us cold. It's outside

some corner grocer--it's Little

Italy--and all that's visible--

it's so dim--a few racks and him

in the doorway at the wall

phone, then coming out,

searching, without his answer,

the turn of the corner in each

direction until, it turns out,

his friend's not coming

and he drops us outside our one

room in the West Bronx

and its kitchen--in the middle

of the night, a bay, no bigger

than an about-face, afloat

with roaches--and when we

are no longer children,

I will learn how bitter for her

such poor castles but, for me,

another country, with no old

drunk on the first floor dropping

like a spasm of echoes out

of his doorway or spread out

in his own slime, like a slug,

and through powdery lips, green

at the corners, breathing up

out of the mud-and-mop-streaked

blue and white mosaic,

smelling like a fen

of sour booze and urine and puke

and armpits and unwashed crotch

and underwear, who once grabbed

at my small legs to pull

me down into the caverns

of his oblivion. And once,

once before, my uncle gave

me a lift--out near Great Neck--

and sent me in to get my hair

cut and took me down once

int the snow--lit by the street-

lights and the moon and the store

windows--to watch together

with him for my aunt, so late,

so overdue, whose hand

he always held and would kiss

her fingers, and recalculated

strange, fluent, importunate

permutations of the odds

that in the light of each next

trolley car, that she'd appear,

and step down out of the halo

of its doorway, like a princess,

and she did--and I, breathless,

excited, not knowing

whether such mastery of life

was in miracles or in the arcane

prestidigitation of the odds.

From Playing the Numbers, University of North Dakota Press (1986).