Judy Kronenfeld
If Only There Were Stations of the Air
by Judy Kronenfeld
ISBN: 978-1-962405-01-0
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Judy Kronenfeld’s sixth full-length book of poetry is If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), and her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her memoir-in-essays-and-poems, Apartness, is forthcoming in 2025 from Inlandia Books. She lives in Riverside, California, with her anthropologist husband.
Ode On a New York Street
—after a photograph by Vivian Maier (U.S.A.), titled East 108th Street, September 28th, 1959*
A shabby building, sidewalk in front a stained,
never-finished palimpsest, littered with a snow
of debris—dropped, blown-in, un-picked up.
But it’s home. For those who raise their window sashes
in apartments clammy as wet clothes.
For whoever propped open the front door,
hoping for a stray breeze in the dark hall.
Home for the two ground-floor kids
with a great view of the street, snacking
as if at the movies—their elbows cushioned
on their pillow-softened window sill.
Home for whoever lives on the floor above
where a pillow’s on the sill in readiness, too,
like a reserved spot at the theater.
Home for the buxom woman framed
by her window—like the girl Rembrandt
painted, peering from the upper half
of her Dutch door. The modern woman
also almost leans through that proscenium arch
from the dim backdrop of her privacy;
she’s focused on what the man
on the street below forever hides
in his hands, as is the woman by his side.
What transaction could they be engaged in?
Magnetic field of home, enclosing
the young kids sent out into the “fresh air”
after school, instructed to stay “on the block”:
the blond girl sitting on the dirty stoop,
regarding something in her lap,
the brunette standing near, who might
be pressing her to play, the boy
(whose tush in shorts and one
bare leg are all we see) perhaps about
to “scooter-ride”: one foot on the bar
yoking the back wheels of his trike,
the other pushing against the sidewalk—
kinesthetics I suddenly recall from being five!
What delicious thing has made the ample woman
at the center of the scene break into a smile
of such delight? Something the friend
she’s walking with has said, whose own cheek
might be a little puffed with glee?
What is the man with jutting nose and chin,
hands fixed on hips—the only person
both alone and static, unengaged—
staring at, and why?
These stories in medias res have long
concluded, and there is no key,
yet—spectators of the spectators—
we look on and on. Oh silent cityscape,
frozen by the shutter’s click,
you tease us out of thought!
And rush us former city kids to when
“going outside” meant to descend,
on a warm fall afternoon, into the redolent,
riveting street of all Being.
*https://www.vivianmaier.com/gallery/street-1/#slide-33
