Like many prewar apartment buildings, this one
has a name: Convent Court after its location
on Convent Avenue in New York. Built in a time
of luxury now gone, its grand details—the good stone,
the traces of terra-cotta, the time-dimmed
marble, the generous proportions—are still
stubbornly apparent beneath the signs
of neglect—sections of cornice razed rather
than repaired, lintels like sagging eyelids over
windows wide open in cold weather to combat
ancient radiators with broken shutoff valves.
Word on the block is that many of the apartments
have been illegally subdivided and sublet
to recent immigrants from Africa.
In winter, the young men walk through the snow
with bare ankles beneath the ornate hems
of their robes, fabrics bright as jewels half-swathed
by drab jackets too thin to be warm.
We native New Yorkers, trammeled with boots
and parkas, watch bemused as they stride
through freezing mornings with legs made of fire.
In the basement of the building an impromptu mosque
has sprung up, accessible down a flight of stairs
from the street, the musical call to prayer rising faint
and foreign onto the avenue as the men—many
of them street vendors or cab drivers—appear from all
directions, invisible in the city as they carry
on with living, but visible—no, luminous—
in the beeline toward belief.