Pub Crawl #5—Twilight in the City
“Twilight in the City" (Brooklyn Review, 2001)
Every Pub Crawl post includes a journal publication of mine—in chronological order from earliest to most recent—with notes about context, craft, autobiography, or close reading. This week’s Pub Crawl features “Twilight in the City.” It appeared in Brooklyn Review (2001), the annual journal of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.
Twilight in the City
Tonight again we watch the sunset
bleed through a gash in the sky,
water towers blacken and char.
Car horns blow in on breezes,
fill the spaces left by fading light.
Color drains from this room,
time floats in space where once
there was a microwave oven.
All that's left here—
the party we threw, P.J.'s dance tapes,
that boy who wanted to sleep with you
and kept asking when I was going home.Notes
“Twilight in the City” appeared in Brooklyn Review in the spring of 2001. This was my first-ever publication in print, back in the days when we still distinguished between print publications and online publications, and gave considerably more credence to the former. My first-ever publication, period, had been in the online version of Brooklyn Review in 2000, when editor Tom Devaney was playing around with the then-novel idea of online-only content. And my next three publications appeared in Dan Nester’s pioneering online journal, La Petite Zine, also in 2000. So it was quite a boost to my still fledgeling poetic ego finally to have my first publication in a print journal. How quaint that feeling seems in retrospect.
☞☞☞Here comes the craft stuff☞☞☞
I’ve mentioned in previous posts how, in my early days on the poetry job, my notebooks were often filled with little snippets that didn’t really belong anywhere, such as
Sunset bleeds through a gash in the sky, water towers blacken and char
Car horns blow in on breezes, fill the spaces left by fading light
Color drains from this room Time floats in space where once there was a microwave oven
I loved these little snippets. I think I wrote all of them in the living room of my apartment on W. 57th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, on the 14th floor, which was really the 13th floor, because once upon a time New Yorkers refused to live on any floor bearing the unlucky number 13. I loved water towers and I loved sunsets. Sometimes the intensely saturated red of a sunset would seem almost like it was bleeding from a wound, and as sunset turned to twilight, the fiery oranges would seem to blacken the wooden staves of the water towers.
As the room darkened around me, it seemed to become empty, as if the furniture and appliances I could no longer see were no longer even there. That’s when I would notice the honking of the car horns on 57th Street, as if those sounds only came into existence as the darkness made room for them. And where before I had seen a microwave oven, I now saw only the LED clock, as if time were floating in the darkness.
I wanted those snippets, those images, to be part of a poem. But I needed that poem to tell a story, preferably a love story of sorts, the way most of my poems did in those days. Hence the speaker is joined by a partner who looks on with him as my beloved snippets make there way into a poem—
Tonight again we watch the sunset
My snippets turn this willy nilly into a poem of loss. The loss of light, the loss of sight, objects lost in the dark. Sounds become more sensible as darkness deprives the speaker and his companion of vision. To my poet brain, this was a signal, a cue, for emotional loss to enter the poem. The transitional phrase
All that’s left here—
may lead the reader to expect something about “you and I” to follow—All that’s left here is us, our love, as we cling to each other in the darkness of night in our cozy little apartment up above the taxis and buses of New York City. Instead—because this is, after all, a Michael Broder poem—what’s left is the aftermath of a typical New York apartment dance party, complete with mix tapes—an aftermath freighted with sadness, loneliness, the fear of betrayal, the risk of abandonment.
One more thing I want to mention: that sneaky little word in the first line, “again.” Tonight again we watch the sunset. These boyfriends have been here before. Together. Bearing witness. It’s in that very first line that the lovers cling to each other in their cozy little apartment. And it’s not a lie, or even a misrepresentation. They do love each other. And yet….
If you liked this post, please consider clicking the ❤️ below. I welcome your comments, too, on the poem itself, or any aspect of this post, or anything you would like to share about the writing or reading of poetry.
Did you say you were also a Virgo? Such records you've kept!