文章基本信息

Bruce Smith: Crossover

Smith, Bruce

The air like the street numbers was high and rare and had a low-voltage, low-wattage light and flavor

of something burning still from the extinguished 60's

or something about to be combusted in commodities

and futures remembered now as then. Bread and junk were cut and risen out of the sub-basements

to the street in packages of Wonder and bags of Mrs. Jones. Substance and dust. Through the crossed wires of the telephones

voices from Memphis said Jerusalem was on fire.

All I could do was talk about desire

while I rendered the face of the Sojourner Truth Apartments, like a myopic Monet, in different light. Mostly I was mute.

Upstairs the dancer turned engineer was mostly in tears. The air shaft was a cloud chamber of jilted beds and chairs.

I wanted to translate the stems of red carnations in the gutter and the golden fluids of the Eldorado and the Town Car

up on cinder blocks all winter into the language of enduring or something the choirs of instantly aging

kids could carry across or over or up in their arrangements. Thieves stole first my stereo, then my jazz, and then my pants

as I kept misinterpreting black white versions of myself on subways where I was heading north while I was heading south.

I wanted a Japanese swiftness, a zen gesture of mind, no mind. I wanted a witness

to the witness of myself--another pair of eyes that wouldn't obliterate, gild or veil the flash, the exhaust, the immediate.

I lived in time and out of time by the agency of smell, old animal brain and angel, deathless and keen and insubstantial.

Everywhere the scent of cabbage--the rubbery emblem and sweet reek of whatever peasant I was, or am, or will be-

veggie moo shi, dolma, caldo verde, sauerkraut, bubble and squeak, kim chee,

boiled with potatoes, a side order of slaw, remembering Columbus Avenue and 106th Street.