"Bleecker Street"
"It's a lovely June afternoon and I'm heading up
Bleecker Street for a hazelnut espresso latte,
the kind made out of real hazelnuts, not syrup,
hoping it will empty me of all my bickering ideas about love
and fate and immortality, so I can hear
the fertile songs of spring.
Miguel de Unamuno, whose name is impossible to say
without smiling, believed self-love widens
into love of all that lives.
Thank God for Unamuno, for hazelnut lattes.
But the infinite archaeology of my stupidity
prefers the charms of self-pity to the equilibrium
of self-love.
Perhaps these three Chinese girls
giggling into cell phones, lavishly spending
each moment of their youth, truly
believe the mountain of self has no top,
and each breath is a reckoning with fate.
Perhaps these shiny boutiques, each so resolute,
so eager to please, are weary of decorating
the illusions of another century,
prefer the runaway slaves they hid in their root
cellars, their dreams of slaughter and deliverance.
Perhaps this beautiful blonde woman,
screeching to a stop in a lilac Mercedes,
pursued by wailing police cars, finally
understands that it is not only for the soul, but for the mind
that happiness is a necessity.
'Is the rich bimbo stoned or just stupid?'
an old man, radiant with rage, screams.
Perhaps everyone secretly admires
something momentous about himself,
with the mass and inner life of a cathedral,
in the tradition of the Spanish saints
and mystics who cherish the bliss of infinite sacrifice.
Perhaps this street remembers the loneliness of war widows,
the roll call of absent names, its first kisses
on the corner of West 10th Street,
the swooning confetti heat of victory,
the scalding springs of defeat?
Indeed, the street is a wave of advocacy and streaming window
peonies and tulips, a fierce glimpse of history,
an echoing of nightly gunshots, a flag of black pigeons flowing
east toward the end of a continent, a hunger
for immortality, a tiny brusque city, a bickering
idea, a useless boutique, a fertile song widening
into a love for all that lives."