And it’s the same with every foaled load, whether it be boat of sea or boat of land, which is train, or even plane at the aeroport beyond, far out amid the majestic land known as Queens; whatever substance arrived upon, whether it be land, sea, or air, it’s cleaved — they come between. Our island lies halfway between the city, also an island, and Liberty’s woman: she’d been a gift that was also a sacrifice, as if Odysseus’ famed token to Troy, a huge hollowed naked apparition, Rhodessa’s her name, standing out there on the furthest, as if to demarcate our world, upon the first island they pass, no matter their mode of arrival; out so far in the ocean and free as to be almost Joysey — perched just off its banks and barges, its splintered docks, ramshackle warehouses of tumbling store. Between her reach and the spires of the city, our island stands guard, keeps the watery gate, the defense of a pomp once ruined, modest in its glory renewed — at least, no longer sinking; an occasional Atlantis disappearing at hightide, a breathing chest, a pound of flesh, now shored up from the drownless delectation of the parasites it once hosted with dirt dug from under the earth and out from under the ocean surrounding, from the tunnels that would accommodate the traffic of great steel snakes, girded with trash then the flesh of the dead. Their gravestone this Great Hall, a hunk of officialdom made angelic with the addition of two wings, one to each side of the main expanse: a body sprawled, a cruciform corpse, two flightless wings terminating in the talons of those four towers; three porticos top the middle plinth, the head — doubtless, a touch of significance is always involved, a meaning lost on all but the mute and the dead — three porticos of three vaulting windows, Beauxbrilliant, deco’s imposing, and then around that, nothing, emptiness, voided only by trees, scrubby and yet undaunted, survivors themselves, upward growths of salted grasp, weathered whitegray, deepgrained, dustthick: poplar, oak, evergreen firs, they’re all one tree as much as the arrivals can think of them to care; trees nothing but Tree to them in the Platonic ignorance of languages busied being forgotten already — all trees, that is, with the exception of the apple, red and rounding Eden’s, symbolic of their imaginary sin, spitefully generous in its polar fruit, freezerotten hardpitted product their kinder try to bite, lose a tooth on, in anger bombing the orbs at each other’s heads; their bodies to be laidout cold atop iced sprawls intersected with coils of barb, spurs of galvanized iron, scrapped tin, loosened slabs of rafter like ribs, the quarters of the surgeon, the enginehouse thistle, electric and steamplant, furnaces beyond toward the baths to be stoked with stacked wood, bagged coal, mountains high of excess brick, leftovers baked in the cloudless sun, fallen stones and shoring rocks, pallets of glass, plasticwrapped and tarped, readied for an installation forever postponed, reconstruction stalled, put off until the end of time, an overhaul overhauled, a maintenance neglected, forgotten worksite in wasted daylight, bereft by bureaucracy, beset by neglect and trash; grisly verdigris, caltrops of cable and wire, gaping shafts and moaning ducts, hoistways left open to dizzying tumbles, uncovered sewers to fall into and smash a last leg, guttergraves…
Inside it’s unlit, peeling plaster as if the rind of the walls, chairs broken without back or legs and so not really chairs but stools or just mushrooms wrought of wood and barnacled metal, crumbling drapes, shattered glass. Dorm beds, column after column of them, line the floor; the air above infused with the exhaust of their springs; bumcold radiators sheltering mice, shadowing their secretions, turdpellets like bedbugs crushed. Dreams, being the annulment of slights incurred by day, make for the rubble of rumbling night: the bedding stained in blood and cum, mosquito leech and that of unseasonal greenheads, pinched ticks and lice, piss and fecs, mucus, vomit; loneliness given the ceiling lies so high as to be sky, the walls tubercularly white, offbronchial, pearls in the lungs, breath, breathe, at least try to.
