Our city is a sinkhole, falling under the weight of industry and families and new steel buildings. Our gravity pulls us so deep that we can only fill our skies with smog...it has to go somewhere! We want it gone but it won't go away!
Two city's worth of blacktop and pollution broils us in our clothes. We have sore shoulders from hugging the shady spots, and when those places reach critical mass, we fight or we retreat to our fridges. The sun has made us needy, every citizen is a gatekeeper of boats, curtains, private routes to heaven. Instead of love we have our own burning weight; we will not be tricked into embraces which only make us sweat. Sweet nothings are lost in the whir of fans and patio stereos. There is no room in our brains for sex or tipsiness when everything about us is pain.
3 comments:
Like E. B. White's “Here Is New York,” I would hope there's something to love about your city despite the heat (White wrote his classic during an intense heat wave in NYC).
I mention this because your word choices, cadence and style remind me of White's prose (not to mention the urban issues).
As he put it, “I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings.”
Later: “In summer the city contains (except for tourists) only die-hards and authentic characters. No casual, spotty dwellers are around, only the real article. And the town has a somewhat relaxed air, and one can tie in a loincloth, gasping and remembering things.”
Sound familiar? Why not grab a copy of “Here Is New York” and sweat along with E.B.? It’s a great, quick summer read!
I will! And funny, over lunch I was talking to a friend who'd just returned from a New York visit, and she said the heat was unbelievable. And that's saying something from somebody who grew up in this muggy sweatbox.
Now to find "Here Is New York..."
Find it here as a PDF:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/burrows/Hist_66/White.pdf
Let me know if you can't see the whole URL (it didn't appear correctly in the preview).
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