First Look by Joe Bedford
Shortlisted for the first Lunate 500 competition
“Take a deep breath and strap yourself in. There is little point—initially, at least—in carefully picking through the leaps and shifts of Joe Bedford’s crazed city song. Instead, trust its unruly form and follow where it leads. Reach its halting climax gasping for air. (Go back, of course, to begin to understand its remarkable construction.) As a portrait of the intense musicality of Manhattan’s streets, it combines a deep watchfulness and imaginative imagery to hugely satisfying effect. Unlike anything else we received, it was a shoo-in for the shortlist.”
Lunate editors
***
and shackled to the aeroplane by twin navy earphones – unwrapped, jammed uncarefully in. The flutter of a clarinet, the collage of images that belong to the city disappearing underneath me, the city of George Gershwin, the city New York. The engines lift me above his world in glissando, I shut in the tears. In the open sky – Rhapsody in Blue.
Ellis Island rising from a river of brass. Circled in the porthole of a ship – as Gershwin’s ancestors must have seen it. All waistcoats and shawls under the Mother of Exlies, her copper torch and tablet. I was processed eagerly by firm Manhattan hands. Against the office the cymbal-work of the river. A great crash. The Americans spoke in muted
trumpets, then to me in skittering piano too fast. I practiced my alphabet with the map on the wall. Avenue of the Americas, Bleecker Street, Central Park. The same brass Gershwin found there on Sunday afternoons, heat-waves, black-outs, tragedies and collapses. Flutes chase me up and down the metal stairs clinging to the
sides of brownstones, where the noise of televisions announce the same familiar din we gathered to hear in sly packs at home: something to hide from my father. I was the first to fly.
Was the first.
Gershwin heard his Rhapsody in the rattlety-bang of the train. Steel-blue American rhythm
escorting me to JFK. The muck of the bus window the skyscrapers that have almost vanished now beneath me. Something like the sparkling of a xylophone in the passengers staring with me – families seeing America for the first and last time. We had all of us imagined the towering strength of this great symphonic place. The spangled and
unfettered blue of the American flag. Gershwin born into the New World a son of refugees, the overwhelming scale of possibility, the open city. It could never be only the East River, Meadow and Willow Lakes, the Bergen Basin washing right up to the edge of the airport. No great body of water, only the chance of
navigating the endless musical canals of the city. Not to be. The final explanations, performed erratically. Twinkling through the themes already presented by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. The din charged at me and made itself understood. A stamp landed like timpani on my papers. I was brought to the aeroplane.
One last blast from the Empire State. Rhapsody slows and prepares to disappear. In a moment I will be surrounded by it. The gargantuan blue of the sky over New York. Hurtling back towards my former life, the Gershwinite families of the world saving money, drafting letters, queuing in unending lines. The blue is reaching
crescendo all around me. The roar of the engine and the disappointment inside me. One roll of snare, tremolo, cymbal, string. My breath is swallowed up in the din, and held there. Below me, the city into which I could not make one free step disappears from view.