Letter From Brooklyn

By Jacob Scheier

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Jacob Scheier
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-134-0
CHAPTER 1

PRE-OCCUPY

“how weak / we were, and right.”

— Robert Lowell, “The March 2”

    Under General Washington’s stone-stretched arm,
    less than two hundred of us gathered on the steps
    while a passing double-decker (the tourists’
    photographs, our posterity) muffled
    the shouts lobbed at our Bastille,
    the Goldman Sachs tower. “You fucked up,
    suck it up,” I mumbled, beneath the chant,
    investing only so far. Behind me the
    NYSE’s spangled banner stripes were
    a shade of barium against the grainy day.
    Police officers milled … Rain trickled,
    smudged slogans, and dispersed the crowd.
    I took cover under a Starbucks awning —
    its glowing emblem swung in the wind.

LETTER FROM BROOKLYN

    I can already see how this will end.
    How I will grow tired of the bridge’s
    steep incline, and the absent-minded tourists
    wandering into the bicycle path.
    The weather will turn cold.
    But that all happens later.
    For now it is the early edge of fall,
    leaves green still while the air narrows,
    is slightly crisp, almost grazing
    the hair of my arm like a passing stranger,
    as though the air has been forced into intimacy
    by the brevity of daylight.
    But when it starts darkening at 4,
    this closeness, I know, will be a felt distance,
    like someone drawing your attention
    to their lack of intimacy.
    These days I am still walking at a cathedral pace
    beneath the branches bending across avenues,
    brownstones like rows of lived-in chapels,
    like a pop-up picture book I could have had as a child,
    but didn’t. How Brooklyn makes me nostalgic
    for the moment I am walking inside of.
    These late afternoons filled
    with a loneliness that makes me feel
    distinctly myself, and an awareness
    of how rare that is.

THE WORLD-CHANGING BUSINESS

“When I asked her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party … (s)he says: “Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were in the world-changing business. You can’t get much better than that.”

— Vivian Gornick (interviewing Maggie McConnel), The Romance of American Communism

    The world-changing business
    was the family business. My father
    took me to the storefront at the edge of history,
    saying one day all this will be yours.
    But our store was the world and it wasn’t
    supposed to belong to anyon