On Missing O'Keefe

by John Repp

We thought to train to Brooklyn, where dresses hovered in a cool gallery,

            where hats & shoes, thick silver bracelets, pantaloons, bone necklaces

& gobbets of turquoise rested permanent & stark as basalt, fecund aridity

            geometric & fundamental as Georgia herself in every photograph,

but Union Square waylaid us, thousands of tulips, a bed of tiny purple

            somethings—no, I don’t want to hear you play “Stormy Weather”

or disappear that matchbook & I don’t carry bills or coins, just this card

            that commands a train that could bear each of the hundreds here

to Prospect Park or Fort Greene, but back home my family went,

            the language forgiving the presumption of home as it sometimes does,

the scores of stoops down the final blocks bereft of the Depression’s

            gelatin-silver noons, the bedraggled, slick shine the sprung hydrants

gushed then, but the brass letter slots compensated, the card tables,

            mint-crammed pots, blue Madonnas & wicker chairs on the tiny

patios fronting barred windows & wrought-iron gates, honey-brown stoops

            rank on rank up the slope to Amsterdam in the April drizzle

wetting the sacred precincts Duke Ellington once trod—we are tourists

            grateful for the subway a block east & the Foodtown that stocks

our favorite kefir, stone-ground New Mexican cornmeal, the Guatemalan

            coffee ground to powder my wife coos over right before the three

cholos here whenever we are block the sun as they amble in & pose

            near the registers, sculpted behemoths in shower sandals

gathering hugs, kisses & laughter before strolling up & down the aisles

            for the tens of thousands of calories they’ll soon pile

on the minuscule conveyor belts. My wife wants the turquoise bandanna

            the one with the chin-pigtail wears. Pectorals even a quarter the size

of his would satisfy me. My son wants to get some food, like, yesterday

            because after a week, this place is boring—except Strawberry Fields

& OK, the juggler yesterday in Bryant Park, right? No, that was Tuesday,

            warmer than now, our transit cards still full of rides, freedom

goosing us down five flights of stairs to the damp, ammoniac platform

            from which we spotted our only rat of the trip—a glossy,

corpulent fellow scuttling into the arc-light quiet of the uptown tunnel.