Archive > Vol. 19 NO 2

D. Nurkse

Letter From Brooklyn

All my life I feared death. Passionately, dutifully, sardonically, silently. But when it came, nothing changed.

I still brush my teeth, worried the cinnamon dental floss will snag in a back molar. A nose hair protrudes. I can feel it between my thumb and forefinger but I can’t see it, no matter how I angle my face to the mirror. I dress in the clothes on top of the hamper. My shoes pinch.

I walk the dog on Eastern Parkway in the lightest of snows. If anything, I’m more present, focused on the leash, alert to yank him back from the things he loves in the gutter — a bloody tampon, the yellow intricate intestine that must have been a squirrel once.

My neighbor Dolmatov is doling out peanuts to a flock of sparrows. They swoop in from nowhere, ignoring the dog’s outraged stare. The ones in front gobble — me! Me! The ones in back puff themselves up, flaunting the faint oil-slick iridescence of their wings. Their polls glisten with a sheen of sleet. Dolmatov rolls each kernel in his fingers and chooses the recipient: you and you.  With his free hand he cracks the shells. His ample belly props him against his walker.

“Snowy enough for you?” he asks. Like all neighbors, he knows nothing of death.                      

On the next block they are converting a padlocked factory into condos, working on Sunday in bitter cold. High silhouettes in flimsy parkas race across scaffolding, shouting jokes in Nahuatl or Bengali.                  

The child on his skateboard whizzes past me, close as he knows — there is no distance! Distance is mine! It takes all my strength to rein the dog in.

Always when I was alive “life was elsewhere,” in a notebook washed blank in the laundromat, in a glance returned from the tinted window of a passing SUV. Perhaps death is also elsewhere?

The little Haredi girl wants to pet the dog — furtively, conscious of breaking a law — and the dog strains forward, fascinated.  Fascinated! Is that the only change? That and the swiftness of the clouds, passing from Jersey to the Verrazano in a heartbeat?

At night here are the tenements of my childhood. A single lit window reigns, making the city so vast, so empty. The face that shines there, always in profile — is that my father?

All my life I waited for you, passionately, bitterly, in silence, counting the breaths.