This is a poem called "Playing Until Dark."
And it's the very first poem I ever
wrote about being in New York.
And I tried several.
I don't know exactly why, but I felt
obliged to write a poem about New York.
And I had hardly been there to spend weekends, no less,
not really knowing the city.
I think that was partly a result of living on the East Coast
and being a Westerner totally unfamiliar with New York City.
No one could have been more surprised
than I was to find that Boston was on the other side of New
York City, for instance.
And that Baltimore and all of these cities
were in a row, very, very close to each other, Philadelphia.
And I was staggered the first time
I traveled up and down that coast.
Because, of course, in the West Coast,
it's Seattle, Tacoma, if you count Tacoma at all,
usually I don't except as a kind of a stopping place.
Seattle and Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
And suddenly to find cities bigger than any of these
crammed together right next to each other was amazing.
And I felt I wanted to master them in some kind of way.
And couldn't, for the life of me,
write a New York poem as long as I was trying that.
It was absolutely, totally impossible.
And then one day I wrote a poem which
had nothing to do with being a New York poem
and looked at it later and realized, aha.
"Playing Until Dark."
"Spiraling down out of the Guggenheim,
our daughter packed on my back and giddy still
from her first encounter with the colors of Chagall
whirling in the eye of Wright's great twister,
we venture past Good Humor Man and into Central Park.
Here, bums and tourists, the wealthies, colored nurse maids
free of Harlem until dark, and men retired from everything
are gathered on benches with fallen leaves.
We're tired too and come here to forget what time it is
and where we are.
The child is our only innocence.
And here, this afternoon on the dry grass of a park,
we play at being young while she believes us.
Above and behind us on a bolder, half-hidden by trees,
a man on his haunches squats to photograph
a friend who masturbates.
His picture will include us at a distance playing in the park.
He has made us strangers to ourselves
and strangers to our child in the silence that
has stopped the game.
We move on and trees conceal their figures on the stone.
Beyond the lined up benches, we take
a path descending to a lake.
All around are nurses, families picnicking, men
asleep with newspapers, and women sitting near them alone,
staring beyond their children and each other
into those waters of their world where sullen swans bask,
adrift in the breakage of their own reflections."