Allyson Paty

 

Premise

 

Having woken from the dream of riding on a flat tire

 

Having carried the scrape and-a-one-two, scrape and-a, scrape scrape onto the train

 

Having surfaced in a heart of commerce, closed

 

Having taxed the muscles in a pack of women

 

Having paid to

 

Having creamed our faces in a crowded mirror

 

Having walked a mall-like stretch of a famous avenue

 

Having passed two men caked in dust, one

 

Having aimed a miniature leaf blower at his chest

 

Having turned it on his companion, who

 

Having swept his arms dramatically

 

Having pushed the tool gently away, both men

 

Having laughed, somewhat cleaner

 

Having caught my reflection in the windowed façade of a bank

 

Having admired the ranunculus in a garden box of a white-brick building one block long

 

Having held a low opinion of this architectural style, but that vision of modernity

 

Having become passé

 

Having come to a kind of charm in it

 

Having blushed at nostalgia’s dim revision

 

Having turned left at the park

 

Having been too early for students, their habitual swarm

 

Having drawn the emptiness across honeycomb pavement into suspense

 

Having been the site of a parade ground, a public grave, and farmland

 

Having, in a time of resistance, formed a border between New Amsterdam to the south and the Lenape to the North, the plots

 

Having been parceled out by the Dutch West India company to eleven men

 

Having been enslaved by the charter

 

Having petitioned for freedom and

 

Having attained a conditional version, the terms of which

 

Having not extended to any children living or future

 

Having required annual payments of grain and livestock and occasional service

 

Having included a lot on this acreage, which grew over centuries into an enclave of freemen despite

 

Having under British rule been stripped of their deeds to the land

 

Having been cleared from forest, a stream rich in trout

 

Having coursed and—polluted, used as a sewer, and finally buried—possibly coursing

 

Having nodded good morning to a woman’s request for a dollar like I don’t understand the ask

 

Having pulled the heavy institutional door

 

Having flashed ID to George

 

Having read yesterday’s memo

 

Having ridden the elevator to eight

 

Having forgotten already—one man’s shirt was neon orange, but was the leaf blower’s matching or green?

 

Having gone to the desk and turned on the Dell

 

Having eaten a yogurt purchased on the famous avenue for $1.79

 

Having gone to the kitchen to recycle the cup, despite

 

Having seen the bins emptied into a common dumpster

 

Having nodded to the assorted labors, human and bovine, past and to come

 

Having said internally bon voyage

 

Having read that plastics remain 450 to 1000 years intact

 

Having greeted a coworker Good morning, Good morning

 

Having typed 1569 into the browser’s search bar

 

Having wanted 450 years to feel real or specific

 

Having read Wikipedia’s list of deaths in that year, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

 

Having been among the names

 

Having turned to the tasks that constitute my employment, e.g.

 

Having volleyed a quantity of emails

 

Having projected into that near-future space where I hope this finds you well

 

Having chanted internally from Alice Notley, All day you have to in the lough

 

Having read the line on the morning train

 

Having said it alternately law and loff

 

Having consulted circa 1:00 p.m. merriam-webster.com

 

Having thought, But in a lake, I never feel that I “have to”

 

Having retrieved lunch from the fridge

 

Having emptied the container onto a plate

 

Having spoken with coworkers: media, food

 

Having listened partly while replaying internally the dust exchange

 

Having cast both shirts as orange

 

Having recalled in your orange shirt you look like / a better happier St. Sebastian despite

 

Having pictured that shirt not florescent like the tulips O’Hara goes on to mention but something more like sherbet, the men this morning

 

Having cleaned via pantomime of cleaning

 

Having slid tenderness inside a macho exchange

 

Having rendered the image of a rough touch via a light one

 

Having returned to my desk

 

Having typed wedding dance into the browser

 

Having encountered a field of photographs showing formally dressed white people on lustrous floors

Having realized my mistake

 

Having added bruegel

 

Having seen this painting at the DIA

 

Having been in town for a wedding

 

Having gravitated to the reds, the reveling peasants

 

Having been painted happy and plump, Antwerp

 

Having operated refineries for the quantities of sugarcane imported from the Americas, the city

 

Having become rich, Flemish merchants presumably

 

Having wanted to admire a cheerful image of their commoner countrymen, their carousing

 

Having been read as a celebration of local customs at a time of Spanish rule but

 

Having also been read as a moral statement against the underclasses, Flanders

 

Having been in the throes of the Reformation, on the brink of the Eighty Years’ War

 

Having typed an associative list:

Having rendered foremost a picture of an education, the present

 

Having ground a myopic lens

 

Having looked through or only at it

 

Having glanced to the corner of the screen: 1:37better get back, but

 

Having typed into the search bar 1019

 

Having recognized only names: Song Dynasty, Kyūshū, Manchuria, Kiev, its Wikipedia entry

 

Having been less than half the length than 1569’s—gross distance or the contributors’ skew toward a Europe (then “dark”)?

 

Having tried too the Met’s digital collection

Having saved a screenshot: Glaze Clump, 11th–12th century, no image available, not on view

 

Having felt a personal affinity

 

Having scrolled chronologically, the object dated closest to 1019, a single gold dinar (A.H. 419, A.D. 1028, made in Iran (modern Afghanistan), bequest of Joseph H. Durkee, New York, 1898), the coin

 

Having one smoothed and slightly cracked edge, the details

 

Having been effaced, perhaps

 

Having sat unevenly under heat or weight or water

 

Having felt the air in the office suddenly thick, the skies

 

Having opened, I was certain, despite

 

Having been nowhere near a window

 

Having thought the rage of the gods despite

 

Having not once considered divine emotion as

 

Having shaped the observable world

 

Having inherited instead a humanism in which there are natural forces and people who act and

 

Having felt that worldview scrape and-a scrape, metal rims

 

Having bent against road

 

 

 

Allyson Paty is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Five O’clock on the Shore (above/ground press, 2019). She is co-founding editor of Singing Saw Press, Associate Director of NYU Gallatin’s Writing Program, and a teacher in NYU’s Prison Education Program. Her poems appear in publications including BOMB, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, among others and are forthcoming in The Yale Review.