Journal, Day Three

Whatever purpose the cafe has served for poets since the dawn of urbanism, it is now just another place to be alone among others. What’s the fun in being a voyeur in a roomful of laptop junkies? I’m trying to ignore the blaring music that forms an integument between nonspeaking patrons, not so much muffling the few conversations that exist but rather masking the greater silence. . . .

I have a fantasy about pub culture in Europe, where strangers dissolve into neighbors; different walks of life mingle; poets get ideas. Here, the art on the wall is for sale and the many electrical outlets exist for one purpose. Poet, you’re on your own.

Then I get a call from my husband; do I want to meet downtown for lunch? At that old (1903) Italian restaurant by the Fulton Fish Market with the fading painted sign and shabby wooden booths? Indeed I do. The sunlight is wet on the aluminum roofs and chimneys and skylights of Brooklyn: the panorama gleams below the highest point in the New York subway system, where the F train bends from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens, and then I see nothing as I’m pulled underground, then underwater, to what I think of as Whitman’s and Melville’s New York: the financial district. I worked here from 2000 to 2002, and sense memories surface with the force of déjà vu. The place is teeming at lunchtime, when car traffic is blocked off. The Fulton Fish Market has only recently relocated, and I can barely detect its old odor, the one I associate with decrepit brick three-story rowhomes on battered cobblestone streets. Now there are condos in new brick vestments with views of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s real estate.

But once inside the restaurant, things are different. The dark interior, homely furnishings, chalkboard fish specials; the American flag and fisherman figurines; mounted trout, mounted TV, ballgame at low volume. The first thing you notice is conversation, plenty of it, overlapping. There are singletons too, a woman reading the New York Post at the bar with a bowl of pasta and a glass of red wine; there’s a man in a business suit talking about “hitting it behind the bullpen” with the bartender; there are parties of four in the sheltered booths with the sunlight filtered through dingy windows and greeny flowerpots. Here a poet might nurse a beer and overhear something that could start a poem.

Back when I would use my lunch hour to prowl these streets, I would dream of yes, Whitman and Melville, but I would peer across the river at Brooklyn Heights and dream of Hart Crane and the Bowleses and David Schubert, introduced to me by John Ashbery’s book Other Traditions and then the Quarterly Review of Literature’s David Schubert: Works and Days. One day I hopped on the train and traveled one stop over to find Pierrepont Street, where David Schubert had lived and gone mad.

I found his building. It was once the last brownstone on the street, but its views of the harbor are probably completely obscured by the tall condo that has since grown up in the narrow lot between it and the end of the block. I recalled Schubert’s widow’s terrible account of the last night he spent in that garret, before he disappeared and eventually became committed to mental hospitals: he threw her good shoes out the window (in the Depression, she said, everyone had only two pairs of shoes). It was January, and snowing. When the snow melted in April, she saw the shoes on a ledge and retrieved them.

I stood outside the magnificent brownstone, far enough across the street to see into its garret windows (there were tulips in a vase); then I walked on. Down the street was a dark little secondhand bookstore, and there I purchase a five-dollar hardcover anthology from 1962, edited by two of Schubert’s friends: Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska. It can’t be very famous. The Crystal Cabinet it’s called, and seems to have no particular criteria besides timeless lyricism: Charles d’Orleans and Cavafy, Robert Hillyer and ee cummings; Edward Arlington Robinson and Yeats and Robert Duncan. And yes, they included their old friend David Schubert’s “A Kind Valentine.” What a darling book. I walked out of the bookstore and back on the train to my cubicle.