A rapist on the Staten Island Ferry lusts after the Statue of Liberty. On Canal Street, a Chinese wife makes a break for freedom. And then King Kong and the Statue of Liberty switch places. A new revision of an old New York poem.
1
Bad
Dingo rides
the
Staten Island ferry
dusk
till dawn,
clinging
to rail,
nestling
an all-night
tumescence,
hard
at the sight
of
the robed lady,
vast,
unapproachable.
He’s
stalking her,
biding
his time.
Some
night
there’d be a fog,
a power failure.
He’d
come up behind her,
prodding the small
of her spine
with
his imperious knife,
jostling
her bronze buttocks
with
his ardent flesh prod.
She’d
drop the tablet;
the torch would sputter.
He’d
push her off her pedestal.
Bad
Dingo would give it to her good
the way he did to all the
white ladies
in parks and stairwells and
subway cars.
This
would be the rape of all rapes,
the pinnacle of his career,
the ultimate boast
“See
that toppled goddess
in the harbor--
she
ain’t so proud now
since
someone had her,
made her moan.
Bad
Dingo had her,
stuck it to the Statue,
white-lady Liberty!”
2
In
Chinatown,
Mrs.
Wang mounts
a
quiet rebellion
against
the ways of the elders.
She
has done all
her
mother asked her:
married
the boy
the matchmaker ordained,
bore
sons and daughters
in regular order
burned
joss and incense
at every altar,
sending ghost gold and
peaches,
phantom cars and televisions
Hong Kong Hell dollars
to the teeming, greedy
dead.
Now
her husband travels,
has mistresses, won’t talk
about his gambling.
Her
children are gone,
married to foreign devils
Her
round-eyed grandchildren
won’t learn Mandarin,
will never send joss riches
to her when she is dead.
Now
she becomes a whirlwind:
She
sells her jade and porcelain,
cleans
out her savings account,
buys
an airline ticket
for
San Francisco —
from
there, who knows?
She
pawns the statuette
of
pearly white Kuan-Yin,
the
Goddess of Mercy
whose
only blessing
was
endless childbirth
and
washing and ironing,
On
a whim she buys another
to
take its place at her bedside:
a
foot-high Statue of Liberty
with
batteries and glowing torch.
She
leaves it for her husband,
her
wedding ring
on
its spiky crown.
3
Today
two New York titans
switch
places.
A
grumpy Green Liberty
strides
up Fifth Avenue,
crushing
pedestrians in verdigris.
Her
sandalled feet
send
buses flying,
kiosks
shattering.
Her
great head turns
among
the office towers.
She
reaches in,
pulls
screaming executives
through
razor edge panes,
undresses
them
with
her copper fingers,
discards
them one by one
to
the pavement
twenty
stories below.
The
man she wants
is
not among them. He’s got
to
be a real American,
one
of those Arrow short models,
blond,
and a screamer,
a
yielding but unwilling male
under
her stern metallic nails.
The
more he cries out, Put me down,
the
more she likes him.
Uptown,
she finds him:
a
tousle-headed messenger,
scooped
up from his bicycle.
She
cups him in one palm,
drops
her tablet,
rolls
up her sleeves,
and
starts the painful ascent
of
the Empire State Building.
Downtown
on
Liberty Island,
King
Kong wields a torch,
incinerates
all passing freighters,
capsizes
the passenger ships.
He
hurls great boulders skyward,
picks
off incoming airplanes one by one.
He
is guarding the harbor now.
He
is a real American
and
he shouts his slogans:
America
First.
Stay
out.
Go
home.
No
foreigners allowed.
