Ridgewood (Where We Wait)

We take the most delicious train

to the Queens-Brooklyn border to get here

Where everything is liminal, uncertain, undecided

Even the foundation, Arbitration Rock, at the house on Onderdonk

Was buried for centuries, dug up, and chucked on another imaginary line

The streets are on a grid, and the border on a diagonal

making a stair-stepping hypotenuse of the confused

A challenge to put your time to good use

even on the oz-like yellow brick road on Stockholm

You hear Poles on the street muttering “Marnowanie mojego

czasu tutaj” through the bachata dripping

from the apartments above the stores on Fresh Pond Road

Two of the best restaurants in the boroughs

Rosa’s pizza and Zum Stammtisch mark

the north and south borders of the hill where we wait

During the seventy-seven riots, Ridgewood

seceded from her stepsister, broke from Boswijk and Breuckelen

-

There’s racism here like carbon monoxide smoke:

at the Ridgewood Y, a man sweats through his shirt

revealing swastikas pierced through the skin underneath

and the Romanian dentist down the street drilling

says “Cred ca am pierd timpul meu aici”

through the machinery scream and burning enamel

she won’t say this if you understand what she means

Walking past the 99 cent stores and the pharmacies,

remembering that there is good, fast, and cheap

But you can only have two of them at the same time,

Crazy Loretta, under her navy knit woolen hat

in her pink sweatsuit and winter coat, smokes

her shaking hand-rolled cigarettes below the train

trestle grinning with her jaw-jutting through

her inch thick specs. She waggles her chicken bone fingers

saying, “Hiya honey” when you walk by.

If you are brave enough to stop and talk to her,

she’ll tell you that her nephew plays

for the Texas Rangers and her daughter

is a doctor and she’ll probably give you bedbugs

She’ll tell you, fascinated, like a child: “when you squish them - the blood comes out”

She’ll tell you the same thing tomorrow - Loretta forgets.

In her mind, a phrase like green smoke from her youth

Ich glaube, ich bin meine Zeit hier

The playgrounds are packed with children

practicing how to swear, the girls huddled

reading Twilight like the Bible, and the boys

huddled reading the girls like the Bible

A woman yells to her son to come home a third time

and mutters “Creo que estoy perdiendo mi tiempo aquí”

Buried in Machpelah Cemetary less than a mile from my house,

is the place Houdini is still staging his greatest escape

He has a wide audience. Sometimes I think there are more dead

residents of Ridgewood than living ones. The cemeteries stretch

the borders of the appropriate spilling into Christ

the King high school’s front lawn. Driving Cypress Hills street,

the Manhattan skyscrapers rise looking tomb-toothed parallaxed and

blurry through ephemeral sepulchres, stones, and cement angels pointing at the sky

On one of the stones it says simply: Videor perdo temporis hic

I think we are wasting our time here.