Edward Field
Oh, the Gingkos
In this city where it's perfectly ordinary
to pass by people collapsed on the sidewalks,
or living under plastic on park benches like gypsy camps,
or on flattened cardboard cartons in doorways,
and the gorgeous shirtless Puerto Ricans
are muttering if not raving as they brandish knives,
and high-speed bicycles, free to ignore traffic rules,
whiz by in all directions,
what, I ask you, is there to be grateful for
except the trees along the streets?
And for them we have to thanks John V. Lindsay,
who was universally belittled as mayor. But now,
let me set the record straight–attention, Historians:
It was he and he alone who got those trees planted,
the only thing the eyes can bear to look at these days
in a city rotten and stinking in the summer heat
like a garbage dump.
It is hard to imagine these streets anymore
without their trees. But the way I remember it,
after Lindsay was elected, the city was paralyzed by strikes–
teachers, subway and buses, garbagemen, all out,
until he was forced to play along
and made the banks happy by borrowing.
What the hell, he must have said,
what's a hundred thousand more for trees?
Oh, the gingkos he planted,
forests worth of gingkos, which only stink later
in the crisp days of fall.
Oh, the locusts, the sycamores,
oh, the stand of oaks battling the fumes in Jackson Square,
oh, the green shade of the linden trees
of Abingdon Square in the Village, now alas,
taken over by a colony of the homeless,
but that's not Lindsay's fault.
I want to say it again and again–
in a country where the government
let's its people rot on the streets,
it was Mayor Lindsay who planted the trees–and oh yes,
put this also on his tombstone, may he live a thousand years:
He stopped the police from raiding gay bars.
Edward Field, Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems, 1963-1992, Black Sparrow Press, 1992.