New Year's Eve 1989
Up on the roof, waiting for the fireworks to begin
in warm winter rain, a moment ago I stepped
from the elevator into the black air
of an almost New Year
and need a minute to catch my breath
at the spread of city open to my eye.
I can't go to the edge; I never could.
The old fear of height still troubles me,
the sensation that nothing can be under me
if I am surrounded by mist and rain
and all of the dark night air we breathe.
Even a glimpse at the treetops in the park,
with its slick crisscrossing roads that plunge
into the jumbled panorama of East Side Manhattan,
hysterical tonight with its own incandescence,
gives me the willies. I feel as if
I were standing on the deck of a showboat of a cloud
as it drifts down some dark river, waiting for it
to bang into some other building's fifteenth floor.
How can these old people hunch the railing,
hoisting their plastic glasses of champagne
from under dripping umbrellas, as if
they drank the rain as they laugh
their analyses of the weather?
Maybe now, like me, they have nothing to lose.
I moved in three weeks ago; this is my first trip
to the roof. I don't want to die tonight,
the first fatality of 1990! There's too much of me
I left in pieces last year, oh, the whole last decade:
But I'm up here to distract myself, temporarily,
from what I don't want or can't have
in the way of love. . . . That must be
the Triborough Bridge, tied in its strings
of blue lights, and I can see in Central Park
the skating rink, like a scoured mirror below,
where some madman waves a red lantern; he
must be drunk. I have only sipped a speck of Drambuie,
which I didn't carry in my Coca-Cola glass
up to these festivities. This is the first New Year's
I've spent alone in twenty, twenty-two years.
I never could go to the edge; but I did.
Out there in the dark: my marriage, the woman
I loved badly, as she did me, or none too well;
the places we lived; the apartment I once half-owned;
the thousands of books I had to leave behind
(though I am to be granted library privileges)
and the black and white cat I really miss.
My wife's with her friends tonight somewhere in Brooklyn;
friends of mine out there, too, though I don't know
where. It's just like me to move in the middle
of a telephone company strike. Thus, no calls
from anyone—and I don't even have
a telephone yet, so who could call? Damp but trying
to smile, I eye the revelers. Two young men
and their enormous girlfriends have joined us,
really large women who carry balloons, all ready
to froth in merry champagne. We check
our watches to the screams from swarms
of apartment windows to the west
as the sky lights up with the first furious
bombardment of colored shells. I can see that
red lantern swinging toward the rockets—aha!
So it wasn't a drunk, but the fireworks engineer
preparing to blow the year's last sky
to smithereens for our delight!
I like to follow the tiny spurts of flame
from the launching pad in their heavenward trajectory
as much as I like the rockets' red glare,
the bombs bursting in air, which give proof
to the night that I am still here, hands
jammed in the pockets of my sodden raincoat,
face dripping with rain, hat soaked, wondering
if the skinny guy in the army jacket behind me
(who looks just like I did in the sixties)
is mumbling his way into a combat flashback
and ready to hurl me over the edge of the roof
and into kingdom come. I guess not yet. We've
survived the first blasts of spinning green,
corkscrews of spangled flame, buds of fireballs
spewed in arching gold sprays, the whistling fire-fish
that curl and howl as they flare, falling to ash.
Screaming its head off, the New York New Year enters.
I feel sad that beautiful things must die,
even shadows made of smoke and flame,
whatever I thought I had made out of my life—
music, poems, books, kisses, a little useless fame.
The army guy behind me grumbles at the haze
of rocket smoke that coils around the trees,
then tumbles up into the air toward Harlem.
That bump and thud and bump sound everywhere,
more clouds smacking each other head-on.
The flashes of the explosions are close enough
to touch if you wanted to burn your fingers
on the sky, and the glare rocks our shadows back
against the brick, as if chaos snapped
our pictures in the dark. I smile for my portrait,
curious at the New Year, smelling the acrid smoke
of the one we've just destroyed. Then I squeeze into
the tiny elevator car with the others, anonymous,
reconciled to be so, back to my little apartment
and the waiting glass of amber drink I'll raise,
only half in jest, to my new life.
Copyright Credit: Bill Zavatsky, "New Year’s Eve 1989" from Where X Marks the Spot. Copyright © 2006 by Bill Zavatsky. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press.