Eight Days a Week

There's a calm that sets upon Barclay's Grove at 10:15 on the eve of Thanksgiving. There's a pond that never ripples just across from a fountain that always does. There is stillness enough to watch warm breath meet air in smoking ringlets that float three yards. There is stillness enough to realize that I can know someone intimately; that the rest see clusters or soot or buses belching brisk walkers while I alone know the silent stillness of this city's 10:15.

Then the doors swing open and the Beaumont births an audience, thrilled or disgruntled, and the winds pick up and the moon fogs over and man takes over my Manhattan. And suddenly it's ten past tea and I decide to saunter north.

Why does Andante stand for "walking"? Who determines what the tempo is for shifting "left, right, left"?

The pages in my notebook open to D minor. It's curious, how we settle in a key despite our hopes to modulate. There's comfort in tonic. I take a sip.

My grandmother answers the phone and tells me about childhood. She doles out rozhinkes mit mandlen as my present revisits her yesterdays.

She talks about how far they've come. I talk about how I'm returning...

I've romanticized pages of ladino as conversos and moranos intertwined in dance. I've toyed with mizrahi modes because they taste like resistance.

But it's the plea from Wishnetz that jots in solemn repetition at the corners of my consciousness and I know that I am saving notes from the underground.

Night confuses its fall with Twilight. I remove myself to linger on the poetry of eyes.