A couple of weeks ago, in “The Code,” I wrote about my childhood home, the garden apartment community in Queens, New York in which I lived the first ten years of my life.
The garden apartment complex where we lived during my first decade was called – is called – Bell Park Manor Terrace. In the Queens Village neighborhood of suburban looking northeastern Queens, in New York City, it extends over several city blocks on both sides of Hillside Avenue. So well maintained, it looks today exactly as it did then, with its many green, well-manicured lawns among intersecting walkways, its cleanly tended flower beds, its cropped hedges. With our small but inexpensive three-bedroom apartment, it was the best place my family ever lived, before or after my birth, a postwar, Eisenhower-era refuge of sunshine and safety for young veteran families. And just before my tenth birthday, our parents, at our mother’s ever restless behest, moved us away.
Ever after in our family, with wistful longing, that community existed in our collective imagination as the Garden from which we had all been cast. “Bell Park,” when spoken among us, was code for paradise lost. For me especially, the youngest of three children, who had no reference before Bell Park, the tenor of life there, its light, its sounds, the press of uncountable firsts upon my senses and spirit imprinted themselves on me beyond erasure, like the shadow of a mother hawk upon its hatchlings.
Given that recent reference, the time seemed right to publish this poem, the first time I’m sharing on Homo Vitruvius poetry not previously published elsewhere.
The Fireflies Bell Park Manor-Terrace, Queens, New York, 1960 Summer evenings everyone gathers in the court. Children play in the circular, center lawn, while parents mingle before the stoops of the houses, sit on chairs, stroll along the paths. Windows, lamplit surround them and warm them with the nearness of home across the chill expanse. Overhead, the sky is black and shot with stars, hovering (unfathomable doom forestalled) in latency and peace. All come together. Night holds them close and they talk intimate and urgent, voices humming in the darkness like summer bees. Beneath his sapling – saved through the night from thunder wind rain, the slender stalk tied to its likeness with twine entwined in steadfast human hand – the deaf man, deaf from Korea, sits in a lawn chair, sandaled feet crossed in the grass. At his side his daughter prances in a game, pulls on his arm swings it with glee, holding on to what holds her close a tether from this moment to its loss. In the deaf man’s faint smile, far-off stare, his head angled as if to catch some distant strain oblivion. Above them, behind a second-story glow, a father lies darkly ministered by physician and wife his children scattered points of departure on the lawn below, and in the casual conversation, the quiet observations neighbors mutter of chance and outcomes, and consequence hangs in the air like heavy dew. Along the circular walk, a boy wanders alone in the light of his own coming forgetfulness weaves his way among the tall bodies, the old people in lawn chairs, who fix him with remote, disturbing gazes passes beneath the trees into the shining between them beacon of his own forthcoming pausing moving following it might seem, a long invisible thread. A shout, a laugh, the call of his name, break the air, pierce the memory, at a point in the path where no one sits or stands, the thread splits, and voices cease. Throughout the court, the fireflies are aglow their bodies blinking on and off. The strike of a match: a puff: a whisper of smoke in the air: they burst here, burst there above the grass, against the sky, across the distance within his reach. The fireflies: like lanterns up close, or further like stars flickering in a near heaven sudden, temporary lights in a pure imagination lights that are brief and burning illuminating something.
AJA
That's lovely, Jay. I especially enjoyed the image of the children as "scattered points of departure on the lawn". Beautiful.
Thanks Jay. Loved the contrast of the unfathomable immensity of the stars in time and space vs. the intimacy of the scene.