Spalding Gray

Spalding Gray
Where is the Staten Island Ferry taking you today?
You’re inspecting the Hudson, gauging it’s suitability.
The MTA is watching you.
They’d escorted you off earlier that week.
Its’ a foregone conclusion,
You’ve made us laugh with it for years.
Step away from the railing, Sir.

Did you jump or did you slip and fall
trying to talk yourself into jumping?
All it takes is one flake
Of courage, one lapse in neurosis and
You’re in flight, Spald.
You’ve disembarked
From the body that abandoned you,
The defunct mind,
down the hole after your mother.

A glorious hiatus in thought occurs in that splice
after you’ve left the earth, before you’re buried in water.
It's as if you'll never come down.
Then you slap the skin of the river and something is jolted
Out of you, like a body hitting the end of a noose
rudely yanked back when it would prefer to keep falling.
It’s very cold, much colder than you imagined
But after the initial trauma
The river welcomes you.
You’ve slipped back into your berth.
There’s the familiar tranquility of swimming
with the new gravity of the ultimate.
If only you could live through it
It would be your best monologue yet.

And you could. There is a choice
In the white of the searchlight
Peering down at you,
But you can almost see her
Down in the dark,
So you gulp and dive to get there faster.
A thousand silver bubbles
Bloom from your nostrils, your ears,
Your legs and arms and teeth
like stardust.

Now that you’ve vanished
People see you all over town:
In the glass of a bus stop,
At Sardi's, skiing down Park Ave,
flying through the light
on to a movie screen in the Village.

Yesterday I went out on the Ferry
to look for you in the water
And though you washed up
On the shore in Brooklyn
I find you everywhere
sleeping in the East River.

Shorts

There are ladders growing
from the ground
like telephone poles.
Climb to the sun
Climb to a cloud
Climb to the smog
Climb to nowhere.

*

Music is no longer
a fist
It is an open palm
petting your hair.

*

There are no grails here
Only red plastic cups

The Quarry

Seymour looked out at the cliffs that had been carved away and the smooth blue water and wondered how deep the lake was and what lay at the bottom.

He had heard that it used to be a quarry until twenty or so years before. Italians had come over to cut the limestone out and make it into gargoyles that they put in the sky.

Supposedly when the quarry was flooded they abandoned all their machinery down there; Machinery that was too big or too old to be worth hauling out.

He thought about diving in with some goggles and seeing if he could swim down far enough to see the rusted old skeletons of cranes and fossilized shells of drills and ancient dulled knives. Probably no one would ever see them again. They would never again breath the air or feel the wind and sun.

He wondered if he dove off the cliff and hit his head on a rock and disappeared down into the dark how long it would take for him to float to the bottom.

He had grown up in a condo nearby and no matter where he went or what he did he felt the quarry was the center of his world, the great drain that he would always swirl back to, the well spring of his life.

He felt that, no matter what crime he committed, these waters would always offer him absolution.

He dove in.