Battery Park
I swam up to Statue of Liberty before hitting the road to pick her brains. The Lady in the Harbor I knew, I was at her 1986 centennial bash. I jumped off the Battery as I stood, sneakers and all, to show how serious I was.
When I crawled onto her patch, drenched and beat like a rented mule, you know what she said? “We don’t have French fries upstairs, sir.” Nine years before 9/11 she dropped that. She wasn’t a newbie to that sort of stuff, if you heard of “sourkraut” turned “liberty cabbage,” I’m not kidding.
Now I heard a noise. Clack, clack. I turned around. A barefoot woman, her feet of translucent glass, was circling the monument. The feet clacking against the pavement, she wailing, “Americans are a people who already isn’t… living in a country that already conked… Americans are a people who already isn’t… living in a country that already conked…” Conked, the word didn’t fit there at all, at all.
Franz Boas rose off the New Jersey shore.
His bow tie translucent glass, him dancing on a portable grave, which wasn’t a funeral urn, it was an academician’s skull, its eyeholes rolling off like stuff, turning into smaller graves, they going after people, many of them childless, the children falling from the sky like musicians off the ramp, their eyes peeling off, turning into translucent glass, the pavement drawing away, the eyes falling, falling, madness, madness, things conking, oops, cracking apart.
So I knew.
But I still felt like going.