The Korean boy’s bouquets were wrapped in colored cones of tissue paper. Each clump of daisies and roses was plopped into a green caddy-holder that’d supported ten thousand other such profitable decapitations. I heard a sound long forgotten, and only then did I see the bees. Had their fore-bees lived right here since Chelsea was the name of a local farm? Had they shifted their hives from hollow trees to thriving back alleys as time condensed their honeyed choices?

City bees now plundered the last nectar that such bartered blooms would offer. Bees’ hive, where? Some alley chimney of East 57th Street? Maybe Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the river. These flowers, airlifted in, wouldn’t last four days. But insects still fed on them. And helpless not to, flowers seemed ready for last fun, last rites. New York.

Could I call myself grounded in Manhattan, or was I, severed as cut flowers, just pretty enough to still sell myself as vital? I pulled the overcoat around me, I plundered pockets but found I lacked the cash for posies.

Oh well. Leave them to the bees and memory.

Night Class

e read the same novel then met at our table to discuss it, urgent. Márquez and Middlemarch were all we could agree on. We convened most nights at six. Ossorio himself presided over his homemade expresso machine, copper piping and antique spigots; it seemed the creation of a drunk Navy welder, Alexander Calder, and Jules Verne. Ossorio’s prices had advanced again. He still welcomed us with a phrase I learned too late was Spanish for “Ah, here they hop in once more, my white and wounded fluffy baby birds.”

One night, Robert, the boy so often called a lookalike for the archangel Gabriel that ten minutes later he didn’t recall if you’d said that or griped about this recent wet weather, brought our meeting to relative order: “Have you ever considered Heaven? I don’t mean as a travel option. I can’t credit it as an actual place, though hearing that would kill my believing parents. I mean as a subject. We mustn’t let this cynical age Novocaine all our better Christian iconography. There’s still gold in them there hills. Let’s hog it. We’re already out of fashion, none of us is Minimal; but the trend’ll change. They’re already hungry for emotion, our wetness, what Gideon calls our “flaa.”—Can we each agree to do a short work on this topic (a small one in the cases of you, Angie and Gideon)? I want to know now what your tides’ll be, and when you’ll have your masterworks finished. We can throw a recital, reading, and studio visit one night next week. I’m partied out since that eighteenth-century Masked Ball thingum. This will be something real, something new to look forward to. No powdered wigs and beauty marks, umkay? Just ‘chez moi, pour nous,’ Our Blue Heaven, what say?” He sensed an unenthusiasm. “You’re so bossy,” Angie said. Both she and he were “only” children.