Yonkers firefighters battle a 4 alarm fire in an apartment building at 66 Elliott Avenue in Yonkers March 11, 2010. An estimated 30 people were left homeless by the blaze. ( Frank Becerra Jr. / The Journal News )
The number 3 bus going to 242nd and Broadway in the Bronx had to take a detour. There was a tenement building on fire. At 5:35 in the evening the smoke eclipsed southern region of parallel avenues like a fog after humidity and rain. There is a story there of facts only and another in between the lines for poetry and short stories. The photographer has taken a photo of rising flames, broken windows, firefighters on a height defying latter and mothers crying and husbands candidly caught in their silence. The camera has spoken with light, shutter and click.
The number 3 bus going to 242nd and Broadway in the Bronx had to take a detour. There was a tenement building on fire. At 5:35 in the evening the smoke eclipsed southern region of parallel avenues like a fog after humidity and rain. There is a story there of facts only and another in between the lines for poetry and short stories. The photographer has taken a photo of rising flames, broken windows, firefighters on a height defying latter and mothers crying and husbands candidly caught in their silence. The camera has spoken with light, shutter and click.
The Starbuck® on 225th Street closed at nine. The bus to Yonkers was seventeen blocks away. Online the MTA has a subway schedule however only tourists and newcomers take it seriously. I missed the second to last bus which is actually on a schedule which I could never memorize. At Dykman Street it was a little pass ten, there on the number 1 train I decided to get a hot chocolate with Soy milk and have a late night December walk to the bus stop. The beverage did not happen but the walk ensued because there were 45 minutes to consume and a sharp wind rushing through me to defend against. Wrap the two scarves a bit tighter and walk fast keeping the heart pumping at a marathon's pace.
The February 8, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine with a cover of leashed and clothed dogs in a park is where I found Ogden's photo. It was a photo of the actress Penelope Cruz standing in a doorway. It was a photo that made her not look like Penelope Cruz the actress but just a woman standing in a doorway. She is nameless because waiting makes you feel like a lowercase jane doe. The photo told a story more so the photo allowed the viewer to create a story about a woman standing in a doorway looking west, waiting for the sun to set at six seventeen because her sister will arrive via taxi across town and relieve her of her maternal duties. There is a child in the house who biologically belongs to another woman who died on the street corner a block away. This woman named Dysnomia died of a broken heart. The woman in the doorway waiting for her sister discovered Dysnomia laying dead on the corner on a Tuesday evening rushing to catch the six fourty-five bus to get to work. She sprained her ankle when she tripped over the body. This woman had seen Dysnomia in the neighborhood pushing a cluttered supermarket shopping cart. Homeless and silence digging into a trash can for recyclables. This woman in the doorway waiting for her sister in hour of sunset was a practical nurse who worked in a hospice. She knew the flesh tone of the dead. When she pushed herself up from the sidewalk, she heard the shopping cart. She knew the sound of life too. She was an EMT before she moved onto nursing. She had been afraid of being homeless before she tripped, fell and sprain her ankle over this young woman. The ambulance, police, coroner, neighbors, pedestrians and passengers in moving cars were arriving, pointing, muttering, weeping and staring as she held a baby in her arms. There were pages of sheets of music strewn on the sidewalk, along with black and white keys from a piano, guitar necks with strings still attached, a coffee urn, square quilts sewn poorly and soda cans and bottles. These things these items these possessions had to be dug out to reach the baby which was wrapped on a child size pink polyester winter jacket which was most likely bequeath from someone's trash. In the hospital being questioned by detective while standing on the other side of a window watching a doctor and nurse examine the baby, she learned of the mother's named. She begged the nurses to name the child Eris. She asked the social worker if she could foster the child. After week and nine days the woman who now stands in a doorway looking west brought home Eris. This child Eris would keep her from supermarket shopping carts, a disenfranchised silence, and a threatening broken heart.
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Etten, September 1881.
It is said
Vincent van Gogh had infinity
For prostitutes. I say
He had infinity
For loving and to be loved
It is documented
in van Gogh's Dutch
Letters to Theo,
Fellow painters and Gauguin
A desire yearning for
Community like
A spoon cupping hot soup
To remedy heavy spiking rain
That is still in the bones
Lurithen R. Fraser 3/2010
