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Gorgeous
Chaos
Excerpt
Territory
To
a kid it's clear from the start: the wild
street addicted to massed power and speed
filling up at the fuel pump . . .In
the mid-1940s after the war,
Europe plucked and parceled again,
in summer's heatwave we'd unsheathethe
switchblades and pocketknives
we carried to carve a slice of
real estate off the cornerof
Bay Parkway, 65th Street, Brooklyn,
playing Territory.Snug-palmed,
blade-first, we'd fling them
with a rolling heave from the shoulder, and with a twist
of the wrist aim to shavea
rival's ground added
to our own baronies of bare turf
along that dusty curb! Just inchesaway
wavered a shaky, shockable
truce between the cars and us, pint-sized truants
playing stickball, punchball, stoopball, anythingwith
a ball hit back at your center, tuning fork ringing;
or on broken-chained bikes and those makeshift scooters
we rigged from an orange crate stood upright on a plank
fastened to the halves of a rollerskate
nailed to each end, one foot pedaling fast
and faster just to keep from sinkinginto
the softening blacktop . . . Dodging
exhaust fumes, we'd sling green grapes like buckshot,
whole
hard bunches swiped from the old widow's fenced arbor,and
drive her raving from her shaded room.
Ghostly pale, bleached all the more haggard
against mourner's black, she'd rushonto
her top step, eyes and mouth gone
slackly askew cursing us in the hellish
hereafter her Yiddish harangue cast us into; stinging,but
not as sharp as the grapes in handfuls
we'd pelt the invading cars with. Sputtering,
shielding their eyes, drivers would stumblefrom
their armored Fords and Buicks
left in mid-traffic and give chase, but not fast
or far enough through narrow alley mazeswhose
every twist and turn we knew
like the moods in our mothers' faces . . .Even
then, as they fumed and we fled,
all about us the thick, thorny gardens flourished,
while in us a killer instinct layits
larvae in the living stream, as it does
with each deceived, indestructible generation.
Even dread was a kind of octanefueling
the urge
to run with the pack
in long, roving draftsthat
would drain away the years,
and now draws them back.
Place
in the Real1.
There was (or is?) a colonel on my father's side-
he once showed me a photo of
in The New York Times, must have beenlate
1940s. Picture with me if you will
a Bedouin-kin, baked stoic
look in a lean face, earnest gaze,much
like a younger version of my father
with the added dash of a military-bar mustache
above the tailored uniform of the Iraqi elite corps-uncle?
cousin? nephew?-who
knew? In the time it takes to
glance and register a nodeof
hardly any interest to a boy,
I noted the family face, like an echo
visible down the ages, and looked away,taking
in as little as I could then.2.
It
comes
as no surprise: the older you get
the further back it takesto
reach some bare,
buried note
no matter how random or remotea
recognition or fleeting
trace. Except
for an obscure
oddball uncle or two, we hardly knew
his side. . . . He didn't offer,we
didn't pursue-not unusual
for a boy whose total consuming mental effort
was: not to be there. Families are to flee from. . .
.3.
In the cyanide light of recent events,
I wonder what became of him: did the high command
know he was a Jew?Might
he have survived the cabals, purges, coups
that periodically irrigate
those blood-thirsty Biblical sands?If
he converted to other
than the double masquerade of the Marranos,
did he pass, or what loopholes slip through?All
that is moot.
As with the rest of his clan, I never asked
or gave him a thought.In
the annulling anonymity of time that makes us
all the same age at once, little more than
a pang says he has most likely been erasedfrom
human eyes. When mine last saw his,
he could have been anyone-anonymous
as an atom-as my father is and I will be,so
that if only for the moment it takes
to tell of hardly
any difference between a possible life, partlymine,
and certain extinction, which is everyone's,
let this memory pass as virtual
elegy and its fleeting
(as
his life most likely long since did)
take place in the real.
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