Gary Lebel

Miami Notes

‘ . . . it is a privilege to see so
much confusion.”
           Marianne Moore,  The Steeple-Jack

1. Impresst

When the tour bus passed the villas of multi-millionaires along the shores of Indian Creek and the bows of their sleek white yachts cut the water like knives

I was not impressed.

For the famed boutiques in South Beach where impressionable young women in their long summer dresses and sea-blown hair paused to photograph themselves in front of ‘DASH’ and ‘GUCCI’ with their smartphones

there was no rise in my pulse.

As armies of the well-fed sprawled in their white lounge chairs round a bright emerald pool beneath the soft swish of palm leaves at a high end resort

I watched the eyebrows of the art deco buildings across the street lift at the irony.

But late in the day in Little Havana, a very old man looked up at me from where he was sitting as I walked by. He gave me his hand and I stopped and took it: it was chapped and leathery from years of labor, tough but smooth as a woman’s purse, its grip strong with the enduring smile that must have leapt up from his heart. He spoke to me warmly as if he were greeting an old friend while pulling me closer to look into my eyes. Though his words were a flock of sparrows, I caught a few in my net,

            and there in the leveling heat of a mid July day with the lingering taste of café cubano sweet on my tongue,

                        with a flood of congas bursting from smoke shops, sidewalk cafés and ragtops as if to tell us that life itself is an invitation to the dance,

at last,

I was impressed.

	O hear them cry
	through a crack in dream's door,
	the poor, the beaten, the lame,
	the long-ago children marched barefoot in rags
	through the hard, ecumenical rain . . . 

2. As Usual

the boulevard’s aswing with music     a summer noon     men and women in Gomez Park     playing checkers    chess     socializing     laughing    jesting    flirting    the sun beating down on los hijos del sol             art on the lampposts     on the sides of buildings     over stucco  and brick    imágenes  on the fencing round empty lots    in the immaculate windows of trim white galleries     bold and feisty      colors in two dimensions with their toes curling round the cliff-edge of three

and a hunched old man     smallboned  &   frail     in flannel and jeans     head of silver bent over   

shoulders kept upright    by the palms of younger men sitting beside him on the park bench   

pouring hope into his ears     whilea fourth looks on    standing    worried & anguished     phone to his lips  talking   talking   talking

till the ambulance arrives     & its attendants lift him gently      ever-so-gently  (swaddled in those clean white sheets how small and frail the stretcher frames him)      and the siren cuts from the hour the minute

that whisks him away

and the board games continue     the Afro-Cuban music     the mellifluous machineguns of language

as traffic moves on     haltingly   to the slow graceless waltz     of the stoplights on the boulevard

and I wonder

                       whose husband
                       whose father
                      whose grandfather
                      whose uncle
                      whose brother
                      whose cousin
                      whose friend?

while in Pequeño Habana
life goes on

life as usual
goes on

	As if the sea's
	salt-winds had traced
	a winding estuary
	to deliver it,
	the call to be better

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About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.

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