First Snow

"What neighborhood is this, we are passing? I ask the New York Yellow Cab driver. "Queens," he replies. "I've been a lot of places," I say, "but I've never been to Queens," where rows of houses, identical two-storey rectangles, rub shoulders in urban sprawl, lining the road to the airport past empty playgrounds-- their trees like December scarecrows, draped with scarves of snow. A small-town aura resonates in the archives of childhood, calling up the small town that shaped me. Yet, Queens is no uncomplicated place, remembered in the sinews of the soul. Mystique covers this country of Sunday streets where we have not cleared Customs, where no one we loved sleeps in cemeteries, flashing by car windows as fast as our lives, their miniature necropolises dotted with grayed minarets, toy skyscrapers, scraping no sky, unlike in the city we have just left. I've been to honor someone lost, stricken with cancer, dying on the day we revere Pilgrims, sit at feasts, not funerals. I would like to know where you have gone, Pilgrim friend. My driver cannot take me there. He wears black, but has no skull face. As we drive, he falls silent, listening to the static-y, disembodied voices on his radio. There is no road map for where you are now. The eulogy has been spoken-- your ashes borne away.