The Blue Moon Review

At the Chinatown Gate
by Ellen Davis

Coffee at the Nigerian guy's café. Angled blonde wooden table,
    juju music, the street and its washed chaos,
        people as traffic. African songs praise morning

and the sun. Icy glare off a car's tinted windshield.
    Useless to speak of it, the particular
        noise and the quiet

instants of a strange city's 7 a.m. What to do but walk
    the grid of wide boulevards, collecting images,
        impressions -- what? Here in this dailiness,

this morning -- note what follows, what flows. Young pair
    at the table: he's got curls and a fedora, she's wearing
	    a nose ring. They talk about work and the theatre.

Two men in suits, another pair, decide which architect
    will be best for their offices. Outside,
        the street becomes itself, choreographs buses,

subway stations, carpools and parking lots, taxis.
    Time is more like a movie, the expert on the radio claims,
       than a continuum. Each instant a frame

to be sliced and let go. So moving forward and back
    isn't all that impossible. Travel through it,
        then, juggle this pre-taped sequence

of whims and lost chances. They'll all turn up again.
    Down the street from the Nigerian café--
        not far from the day lights and cinnamon

stands an areaway between buildings. A corridor of air,
    of nothing, a space to crawl into or avoid--
        or look for later in the dark. A man, older,

enfolded in tattered rags, materializes, searching
    for shelter from the cold wind. The areaway,
        secret orifice, provides it. He takes his sack

of old clothes and dreams there, relieved briefly.
    He sighs into his red cap. His face is ruddy
        from the elements, the street, his nose

a cold bulb. Remember an areaway from another city night
    on the town one December, lights white
        against polished blocks, the first time

hearing the word "areaway" on that stretch --
    rushing with friends to the car to avoid
        some woman or man panhandling.

Cold, cold. The sun's air, brightness. Light hides
    the cold if briefly. Stride past the Martin Luther
        King Library. It won't open until 9:00 a.m.

but the black men have gathered there
    on the benches in the outdoor courtyard.
        They don't seem to mind waiting.  City planners planted

these white-flowering trees in square plots for this morning,
    blossoms to spite the chill. Achieve the glittering block.
        Closed bars and consignment shops.

A sleeping drunk. Housekeepers waiting at the bus stop.
    Don't turn away from the evidence. Having searched
        for this, searched through a not unexciting life --

don't flinch. Fearsome neighborhood, but for whom?
    Kids live here -- travelling in packs on their way
        to school or whatever and they don't seem frightened.

And across the street arcs the gate. Pagodas in turquoise
    and green stretching into air four stories high.
        Hut after hut of triangular roofs, red and gold paint flaking

from time and the sunlight. Don't cross under the gate
   too quickly. Take time, take it inside the self
        like a piece of glass, like the sea, take it.

Be in that frame of moment to be replayed instantly
    and eternally. The Chinatown gate spans the full boulevard,
        climbs higher into air as it registers.

Convergence of influence. Day into day and another kind
  of light on the subject. On the other side of time
      and this "Chinese" bridge stand rows of multicolored buildings,

each one signed with a name, a picture of a word:
    ideogram. Here, despite depredations --
        the viewer's tangled past and that of the city--

stands a future where every object, every gleaning
    of civilization, flashes its own name. The buildings
       draw themselves and citizens into their histories

and show the way to the future, a life livable,
    without terrors, without poverty and its poor streaking
        this and every city. Why shouldn't it be so.

Pass by the Monument Museum, tribute to the city's past
    infamy or glory. See the soldier in dreadlocks
        and red and white uniform gesturing

from the steps with a rifle. Speaking words to the wanderer.
    The figure suddenly changes -- here is no man,
        but a woman in the guise of a soldier

from the nineteenth century. What is she saying? Calling,
    gesturing, inviting the one on the street to enter.
        This Rastafarian under the Museum's Civil War banner

has answers. If only she could find a tongue
    to talk in, translatable to each street-traveller.
       She speaks in the language of pictures

on the other side of the gate. That border everyone crosses.
    Where names become things and pictures are names
        to the world. She says, come to me.