LEVITTOWN
1953

one two THREE

alike

four
    FIVE alike
:barren with crowds the
blown armed the
      blue collar high school grads etc etc etc
whoever married who

        and so on and so forth said the King of Siam
        The little cupboards of the soldiers
        on the south shore of the fish
              Long Island

In the year of the Dragon
the pale rains of Seoul swelled the Han River
The sons of Madame Curie brought back bolts of flowered silk from Korea
Everything shined:
                  the big square cars
                  the inked signatures on the GI mortgages
                  the pink streetlights of Crabapple Lane

What a treat, huh Patsy?
after two years in a cramped basement flat down the block from
Horace Harding Hospital, Queens

Ah Jack,
a house
a house...

a box for birthing children

and the children poured into the immaculate curves of
Levitt's ingenious streets

Daddy kept his mementos of war in the
rosewood box on his dresser
among Indian Head nickels and Eisenhower silver dollars

:Here's the comb, Daddy.
 Comb out the hair of your daughter...

with the carved and delicate teeth of bamboo

Listen.
Uncle Ray's telling stories of rice and water
from the Second War

And this is the third
There will be a fourth

Even so the
house took two jobs:
o little little alive and dead and tired beautiful
        skin of a dream

You kissed her under the 
streetlamp after Indulgences at Our
Lady of Perpetual Help

The wind slipped between your lips and 
her lips

The wind blows the length of the body
and leads to this
    Umbrella clotheslines
    Boxer shorts and bras
                          Babies conceived in the early winter of the east
                          born in the dog days of August
                          on an island outside the Fabulous City

        Community after community
        Perfectly executed

Levittown:      not enough to survive
                too much to give up
Oh we sure were
Boats takin' on water...

and debt

There was a fourth war
        vapid
domestic
                      One way or the other Everyone's been
                      touched by Madame's terrible light
But a house
      from want or need
                     built by Levitt--
                                      Throw them a bone!
The year Stalin died
                Dogs barked deep in the dark
                Car pulled into the driveway
                My father 
                coming home from Dugan's Bakery
                Her father 
                coming in from Sperry Corp in Great Neck building
                Mark 63 Gunfire Control for the Navy
                His dad, his granpa,
                splitting the gas for the graveyard shift at Grumman's
(The
        fifth 
        war 
revolving 
        just out of sight)

I learned to crawl
among
post-war (housing like barracks),
stratospheric
fall-out
from Nagasaki and
     Hiroshima

from Los Alamos and
     Bikini Atoll

Then walk at the end of my mother
through this
neighborhood of shit
and glory

        this
uniform of another kind

  -Spending Units- the
  Government called the
  Families living there.



The entire sky lit up Clearly the
sky grew closer 
and smaller
(I walked here)
Closer and
smaller
You must not look You cannot look 
                as if it is: directly the sun

At ten months 
the first and only struggle
To balance myself- 
I assure you
it happens so quickly
I assure you it fuses into a
single moment a ball of fire
          biology splitting cells
     physics that
               nuclei cramped
                        inflated
Strangely grateful and fierce in its ownership
                  Cleaving yet
                  cleaving



Well certainly Ollie
                said Stan. Be glad to
        They struggled black and white up the 
                       stairs with ice for the box
Or stuck the more they struggled to flypaper
My father laughing and laughing at their attempts to
free themselves