THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

She arrived barefoot Pulled by the Magnet of music Her shoes Abandoned Like glass slippers Her toddler orbiting her Celestial body Like a baby astronaut Around the hemisphere of her skirt She twirls Like  Gene Kelly’s umbrella In Singing in the Rain As she performs  the spontaneous, Arm swaying wild-child choreography of motherhood Leaving in her car The exhausted Happy Meal  The weaponized heart The inheritance of disappointments The provocation of bills The asterisks  The annotations The affirmations The endless excuses and The resistance to indisputable facts Which is why she is here On leave from the Crusades With its sanguinary battlefield  of computers And coworkers And a marriage  That has lost its romance Like the keys that she can never find

This   can ’ t   possibly  be  my   hand . My hand is the tiny one That tried to weave the infinity of moonlight from the launching pad of a white wicker  cradle My   hand  is the toddler one That was gripped by a grown-up’s bigger one As we darted across The vast, black tar prairie of Jamaica Avenue In the middle of a car stampede. My   hand  is the kindergarten one that  hand  cranked a toy ukulele as if I only had minutes to live Gave life to puppets Clicked Bic pens like they were mini castanets Twirled the TV channel knob like a safecracker And tried to pin the tail on the donkey who had suffered the tragic loss of his own My   hand  is the adolescent one That longed to touch the warm muffin breast  of a willing girl Who would dance with me In the shadows of a school dance As  my  middle school manhood trembled and  throbbed Like the front row of an Elvis concert. My   hand  is ...

A walk All aboard The huff and puff of slow moving trainers Time is dozing like the sun waiting in the wing easing into its first développé, ready to perform its arabesque with its partner, the sky Perfume lingers in the air From the runway of necks and wrists of long stemmed ladies Wearied by winter The convalescence has begun Days are long But not as long as memory Where the reverie of sprinkler dancing The chamber music interplay of baseball And the chimes of Good Humor Are just as clear now As they were to My mom and dad when they shared  a front porch .  hammock Swaying to their fidelity Ice floating in tumblers Cigarettes resting in the ashtrays we made Nested in contentment last night’s fight overruled by love They clung to the moment, just like they hold us in their ghost arms to this very day.

Snow is the accumulation of brushstrokes: Monet’s Magpie Hassam’s Late Afternoon New York Winter Renoir’s Skates in the Bois de Boulogne - framed by my windows which I can fly through on this island of passing days when summer feels as distant as the length of longing My  memories are a mad flurry of hexagonal plates and stellar dendrites that land like parachutes on a wintered battlefield  of insistent jasmine which has survived the casualties and blizzards of the heart. reminding me that weather is as brief  and lonely  as  the daydream that created it.

 When I pass beneath the Greyshot Arch, bound for shadows and sleep, I leave behind the song of the unsettled heart, and enter the stillness — stone and river,  deep. Even so, I will miss walking barefoot on the rolling tide of the Central Park meadow, like Jesus wandering the fringes of an Irish-green Galilee. I will miss moseying — a derby-topped, cane twirling Chaplin — sailing past the silent cyclorama of East Side shops. I will miss being lifted from my feet by the scent of that temptress pizza, falling into the waiting parmesan-coated arms of Ray. I will miss greeting every dog I pass like a returning war hero — thanking them for their service with a formal salute. I will miss the currency exchange of a second-long smile with a passing looker who disappears into the crowd of swells like a film noir dame armed with a shimmy and a smirk. I will miss the stroll through the cornfield maze of The Strand, in search of meaning  that breathes in the belly of books But most ...

When I’m suddenly caught In the swirling inlet riptide of heartbreak I turn to my invisible friend of record Capitol Years Frank, to croon away the pain. Frank The interpreter of maladies and melodies was the tough guy Priest of the Church of Me Too who preached from the cathedral of barrooms in a plume of Camel smoke “This is a gentleman’s drink,” Sinatra once said referring to his signature cocktail which was a mix of four ice cubes, two fingers of Jack Daniel’s and a splash of water. He would never touch the rim of a glass but rather cupped it in his hand with a cocktail napkin and then he would proceed to thinly slice the gabagool of his wrists with the jagged blade edge of rejection like the time he tried to commit suicide to perhaps match the faint forceps scar that ran from his jawline up his cheek to his ear whose skin was mutilated by cystic acne which he hid with make-up. His voice arrived In the ink well of night Like the cavalry Armed with the lyrics Of broken soldiers Stri...

What if the truth is we come back as dogs who can’t tell us who they really are, which is why they act crazy — spinning in circles, chasing their own tails, licking our faces like they’re made of quickly melting ice cream. Maybe there’s a little carryover from their previous lives, which is why they nap all day like Nana or Poppy used to when their eyelids became as heavy as the slow decline of afternoon light. Maybe when we reenter the world we return to our prehistoric state when early man could only say: I’m hungry. I need to go outside. I love you more than you’ll ever know. By barking. Which was once upon a time the official language. Back when we said so much with our eyes, the way all dogs do when they stare into our souls, which they see as clearly as a CAT scan. Or try to signal us with their tails and jiggling butts like they’re desperate to win a game of charades no one at the party can figure out. Playing fetch? The message is clear: I will always return to you. Sleeping at...

Time is the quotidian commute of the sun, the month-long striptease of the moon, the lazy hammock sway of a metronome that sits like a Buddha high atop the lace-covered crest of a Baby Grand— in a splash of sunlight where specks of dust whirl like dervishes. Time is the only thing we want when we’re in love. And the one thing we cannot bear lying awake on the observation deck of our nighttime bed, counting the pink dahlias in the shadows of the wallpapered meadow  that what won’t  let  go. Time, in the daylight hours, is my closest friend— the only one who can take me back to anywhere but here, to the threshold moment of 1970, when the doe-eyed girl with late August skin answered the door, sopping wet hair, a shirt barely snapped, a Hula dancer’s smile whose beauty hit— point-blank, and I was gone falling  backward like Capa’s fallen soldier.

Despite the empty seat across the infinity of a quiet table, I can hear you above the chatter and clatter of the everyday cafe. As Johnny Hartman sings “The Nearness of You” from the piped-in great beyond, your hand journeys past the tiny civilizations of sugar and salt to claim mine. My food delivered like an offering sits - still as a Thiebaud. I close my eyes to go to where you live now and watch moments spin by in a swirl of creams, golds and soft pastels like the Carousel de Saint Pierre whose horses all tell a different tale Some rear. Some gallop. Just like we did when you said I love you too  for the very last time.

You’ve become the keys I cannot find, the misplaced glove the forgotten song that knows the opera of my secrets and lies. You’ve become the unreliable narrator of daydreams And you’ve become The dog, Scampering,   despite the pain along the shore, following footprints the way I do, collecting evidence, never once turning back. Because it knows: no matter what I will always be here.

  I remember my little boy soak tub when bubbles would ricochet off tiles with pop and circumstance. I remember the sleepy time choir of late August crickets whose notes would take flight  and soar in formation in honor of  the death of the day. I remember the sound of my dad laughing at Sid and Imogen like someone was tickling his feet transmitted from  faraway living room island to the shores of my crib which for a one brief second erased his blackboard  and made him forget  the chalk of everyone he had lost and still ached for  just like I did whenever mommy said good night  and would disappear into holy foyer light perhaps forever. Despite the fact that my job then was the pursuit of happiness I was always acutely aware even at two of the hidden companionship of sadness which lived in the secret places of grown-ups who, at the end of each day, from behind the grieving hush of closed bedroom doors, would slip out of their work costumes and life...