Siren, Song

The water, even though it’s dirty and tastes like bleach, washes them away. It’s better than a corner; it’s a tank. I’m not writhing against a pole or sitting on someone’s lap. I wear costumes with sequins and chiffon. Sometimes I don’t wear anything at all; that’s when I’m at my best, somersaulting and nosing my way into your wallet.

The circumstances of separation, the severing of fin from torso, were simple. It began slow and subtle. The rot spread from scale to scale, made the iridescent shine of her tail dull. Summer slipped into fall, the rot continued its advance unnoticed. During winter, the cold slowed the process of decay. But as the waters warmed again, spring then summer, she could no longer ignore the rapid rate at which her body altered. How had it started, this change, this disassembly of parts?

I took the sea to the C

searching for ghosts at Dead Horse beach

a ship appeared to me

I swam out so I could see

"Come aboard my darlin

it's the last time I'll be callin

come aboard and sail with me."

You lay me by the Hudson. By the Prison.
Searchlight tower gone dark in kiddie park.

You came to Ossining to fetch me back.
Drove to Bronx, 2 am, for Kansas Chicken.

When you dumped your engine
to be gnawed at by the ocean,
what better place than near
the pillars that held the floors
that held the beds of the dying
children? Their foundations
pulled back to the center
of the earth with that ebbing
and flowing, that cistern
of empty vessels and decay.

November 24, 1993

Minutes before their first official date, Ralphie felt his confidence flag. He was standing on a street corner, and had to reach down to the hydrant for support. Why was he doing this? It was raining, just a touch, and the air was opaque; when he recovered, Ralphie walked into the bodega on 7th and sat upon a tower of rice bags. He closed his eyes. Any minute now she’d be coming, and he had to be ready.

Poem in Which the Poet Attempts to Teach Children on a Walking Tour of their Own Neighborhood about the Purpose of Urban Poetry, Completely Ignoring the Tree and the River in Front of His Face.

This is all mine.
The iron they pull from the water
came from my hands.
You can find me, if you don’t believe me,
in the names you hold in your teeth
like a pipe. In the smoke rising
over Mott Street, Mott Haven,
Mott Ironworks. The root is mine.
The name is mine. Your heroes died
on streets named after my grandchildren.

For you it’s easy the slip the darkness me
my bones glow like gunshots on the wharf.

Before I even ask what are you swimming for
before I let slip a mess of wires out of my mouth

into the water. I get the sense someone is watching
for us I get the sense I should keep my mouth shut

when you kiss me this time swim off into the bay.

EXT. ATLANTIC OCEAN-SUNSET

A large passenger liner slices through the waves of the Atlantic.  New York’s skyline as it appeared in the 1920’s disappears into the horizon.  

Liberty was not delivered to us in an envelope
she was shipped from grayer pastures and I
breathed life into you in a new land
I brought you here and into her arms
and I am awash of postcards and trapped lightning
I am scabbed over from the coins tossed into me
my currents were made for larger bodies

The year I was born, a hurricane made landfall on Long Island that sent gray Atlantic waves gobbling up the sand and slamming against the building where my family lived. We had a third floor apartment that faced the sea, nothing but a strip of beach between us. When I got a little older, my father would take me onto our terrace during storms to see bolts of lightning slice the water, or watch as the ocean slowly swallowed the sun.

Kelly Sullivan wrote this poem for an event in collaboration with Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool at Recess. See pictures and read more about it here.

Tell me about memory and distance and time. I don’t quite understand how they converge even now, pushing forty. I used to view distance solely in terms of time, used to think any trip that was an hour north was in the same place: visiting cousins in Bergen County, going on trips to museums in the city, venturing off to my dad’s office in North Brunswick. They were all in the neighborhood of an hour from my hometown and, being a child, I never looked at a map, never gleaned where they all were in relation to one another. I thought of everything with a flawed logic, without a sense of space or geometry. That was something I had to learn. It shifted when I went from passenger to driver, changing my relationship to the roads on which I traveled.

Listen to Michael Hearst's composition "Songs for Underwater Ice Cream Trucks." 

Years ago I had a plan. I lived over a hill from the Hudson River, past Sacred Heart Church, past a crumbling downtown and menacing, empty train station. The river in my town was brown and slick, banked with old cranes and unused piers, the bones of heavy industry. A few miles south, men fished in the water, casting lines off docks across 12th Avenue from Fairway, dropping disc-shaped fish into plastic buckets at their feet. They often stood several yards away from one another, not speaking, not looking over their shoulders at the people with shopping carts and their cars’ negotiations of the narrow parking lot. I was always curious whether the fishermen ate the fish they caught or simply poured the bucket back into the river when they’d gotten bored. The fish were small and yellowish, a discolored silver, something metallic and toxic, and I would not have eaten them.

The baby grand was a gift from a man she no longer knows – in any case, no longer wants to know.  He bought it at an estate sale and had it delivered to her apartment, where it now sits in the middle of the room, collecting dust and her unopened mail.  At the time, it seemed like a mad, improvisational gesture – something extravagant and wildly inappropriate, like a diamond tiara or a pair of antlers – a gift with no apparent use.  She should have known he was going to leave her.

Water is not simply a beverage, not simply a medium in which to swim or shower, and it is one of the egregious errors of our thinking to limit the role of this miraculous substance based on function, and in doing so to deny its ability to define, energize, and sanctify our daily lives.

Everett’s not asking why anymore.  He rubs the wedding band on his finger, shimmies it down to his knuckle, and pauses.  The band hovers loosely as he steps closer to the edge of the bridge.  He looks over to Staten Island and over to Brooklyn. The adrenaline is numbing.  He sticks his hand into the wind and shakes the band free, letting it fall into the blackness. He watches it disappear, wanting to hear it break the water’s surface. This is what he’s gotten himself into. The groove in his finger where the band once was is a smooth valley and it makes him realize she’s carved into him.  It reminds him why he is doing this. From behind, the sound of a car horn emerges, as the bridge, brittle, wavers in the wind.