Sunset behind the Verrazano Bridge is beautiful today he imagines she might think, seen as it would be from a standing vantage by the benches where she sits:
She says she sees a little blonde girl in a blue dress with buttercups in her hand for mama “who sits on the bench,” an offering, she adds in suggestion,watching as she does, as she has time and again here in the park by her building where she lives near the bay that opens out from Bath Beach Brooklyn and looks out on Sea Gate, New Jersey and Staten Island, the fore mentioned bridge . . . a screech, she hears, another screech, a baby’s whine, more cacophony, all heard amid a whistle, a bicycle bell, a horn from a car in the distance. All intrude obliquely on her writing these lines about the girl with the buttercups in her hand for her mama on the bench in the park, “a girl with buttercups in her hand for Mama on the bench; the girl in an adorable blue dress with white fringe and a white bow in front–a bicycle passes in a blur, a boy on a scooter whizzes by her as she stands steadfast on two legs. Her mother accepts the flowers in her hand as the girl smiles of course from ear to ear and claps lightly it seems from the distance I have on this vantage, and turns, she does and runs as little girls run in parks with others around her in cacophony.”
Yes, the girl turns smiles walks away in quick restrained steps, or so I heard she revised when rethinking what she said. She , the woman who ives in the building near the park near the bay that looks out on Sea Gate, New Jersey and Staten Island, puts the cap of the pen that she holds in her hand on the pen that she holds in her hand and puts in her bag. She closes her journal and places it in the bag too. She takes a breath, another one deeper than the former,. another one following this one, each one with its appropriate exhalation. She then breathes in again very slowly and exhales just as slowly as if she wanted to expiate something she knew she needed to get rid of in her. S
he rises. She looks to the leaves on the trees along the back perimeter of the park that faces the parkway you would take to the Verranzano Bridge, the name misspelled from the explorer’s name, Verrazzano, “Americans never getting Italian names right.” She can see the bridge through a gap in the leaves of one of the trees from where she stands in the park in front of a bench in a circle of intermittently placed benches around the foot path that encloses the great field at the center of the park, a great lawn that has recently been chewed up by Guatemalans playing Mexicans in soccer.
She takes her bag onto her shoulder. She walks away looking at the trees, the birds, the grass, the sky, the thin wisps of clouds high above the line of cumulus clouds, if there were any cumulus clouds to look at, no. Nearly clear skies today, slightly warm with a nearly cool breeze, an occasional chill you might feel, cool and warm simultaneously, she says to herself, to no one other than herself, as at other times she might be talking to someone in her head.
She leaves the park to stop at the Chinese take-out to get a lunch special for lunch with a hot and sour soup. Sometimes she gets a lunch special to have for dinner.
The Falling Leaf Review 