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IN THE SUN, Part I
by Mike DeCapiteTwo men with poles are breaking up the ice, taking apart the outdoor skating rink, while nearby a man at a table is shading his cell-phone as his baby son plays with a hat and a guy ties an aluminum ladder to the roof of a white pickup. Pigeons on moist pavement The shine on the leaves. The winos on the corner are on their feet, unshaven, bloody, eyes bloated shut, trickles of piss to the curb. Open boxes of lemons, tomatoes, mangos. A blue PG&E repair truck, orange cones. From inside Imperial Auto Painting comes a car wash sound, and a man is taking down the night chain around The House of Brakes. Man looking into traffic with a donut in a white bag. The bus is coming. At the bus stop, a little girl in a purple coat leaps into the street. The cluster as the bus rolls in. Men astride the frame of a house: high and low, climbing around, swinging hammers. People stream past the Watchtower ladies, down the escalator and stairs to the subway. Treetop and telephone pole shadows on a billboard of sunlight on a yellow building side.
Two tiny Mexican girls in tiny Mexican dresses go trailing their mother past three canvas chairs outside the Oya Nike botanica. In the window, a dish of oranges and a basket of white silk roses. A rollerblader with backpack sails past a pit bull tied to a parking meter. Lobsters in a bubbling tank. Peruvians selling knitted hats and three young mariachis with guitars. A restaurant worker in checked pants and smock is sudsing a black plastic garbage can and rinsing it off with a hose. Clean white van with flag stripe and the word JCDecaux parked at a public toilet, attached to it by a hose. A big woman all in purple goes puttering up the sidewalk on a standup motorized scooter, and a man in shorts and sandals hoses two green plastic garbage bins out front of the Fugazi Building, soapy water pooling in the gutter.
As you walk along, try to see what’s reflected on surfaces rather than the surfaces. It’s a reminder that reality is a multidimensional cutup and interesting by reflection.
At a Chinatown street festival, red tents and white tents and shops and sidewalk displays are selling orchids and narcissus and four-foot green stalks of gladiola...ginseng and dried cuttlefish and dried shrimp and large thick-skinned yellow fruit and daikon and roots and branches of Mandarin oranges and electronics and kites and boxes of chirping crickets—not just crickets but chirping frogs—Let no need go unanswered! The women bowl you over with their pink plastic bags of bok choy and cabbages and live birds. Toys and CDs and jewelry and silk slippers and jade carvings and ivory carvings and wood carvings and snap-&-pops and paper lanterns and cardboard accordions, backscratchers, foot massagers, neck massagers, cotton candy...pots, pans, and utensils...dried fungi, beans...soaps, teacups, teas, Mah-Jongg sets...clear oversized bags of dried jellyfish and shark fins...black matted sea grasses and sea fans and anemones...an iced window display of monstrous yellow-brown geoduck clams disgorged from their shells—too shocking even for Nature, let alone human consumption——and plucked marinating blueskinned birds—sparrows? Brooms! Feather dusters! Tangerine peels! Plum blossoms.
A tethered white pony drowses with a child on its back. Opens an eye and tries, again, to shake the carnations out of its mane.
From Brooklyn to San Francisco bits of magnetic tape are strung in bare branches. Birds?
On blue wooden steps, which are splashed with pigeon spatter: a small square shard of mirror, a hairbrush, a lipstick pencil.