WEBVTT

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This is a poem called
"Playing Until Dark."

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And it's the very
first poem I ever

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wrote about being in New York.

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And I tried several.

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I don't know exactly
why, but I felt

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obliged to write a
poem about New York.

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And I had hardly been there
to spend weekends, no less,

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not really knowing the city.

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I think that was partly a result
of living on the East Coast

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and being a Westerner totally
unfamiliar with New York City.

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No one could have
been more surprised

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than I was to find that Boston
was on the other side of New

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York City, for instance.

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And that Baltimore and
all of these cities

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were in a row, very, very close
to each other, Philadelphia.

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And I was staggered
the first time

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I traveled up and
down that coast.

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Because, of course,
in the West Coast,

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it's Seattle, Tacoma, if
you count Tacoma at all,

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usually I don't except as
a kind of a stopping place.

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Seattle and Portland, San
Francisco and Los Angeles.

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And suddenly to find cities
bigger than any of these

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crammed together right next
to each other was amazing.

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And I felt I wanted to master
them in some kind of way.

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And couldn't, for
the life of me,

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write a New York poem as
long as I was trying that.

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It was absolutely,
totally impossible.

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And then one day I
wrote a poem which

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had nothing to do with
being a New York poem

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and looked at it later
and realized, aha.

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"Playing Until Dark."

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"Spiraling down out
of the Guggenheim,

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our daughter packed on
my back and giddy still

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from her first encounter
with the colors of Chagall

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whirling in the eye of
Wright's great twister,

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we venture past Good Humor
Man and into Central Park.

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Here, bums and tourists, the
wealthies, colored nurse maids

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free of Harlem until dark, and
men retired from everything

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are gathered on benches
with fallen leaves.

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We're tired too and come here
to forget what time it is

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and where we are.

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The child is our only innocence.

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And here, this afternoon
on the dry grass of a park,

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we play at being young
while she believes us.

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Above and behind us on a
bolder, half-hidden by trees,

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a man on his haunches
squats to photograph

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a friend who masturbates.

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His picture will include us at
a distance playing in the park.

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He has made us
strangers to ourselves

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and strangers to our
child in the silence that

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has stopped the game.

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We move on and trees conceal
their figures on the stone.

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Beyond the lined
up benches, we take

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a path descending to a lake.

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All around are nurses,
families picnicking, men

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asleep with newspapers, and
women sitting near them alone,

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staring beyond their
children and each other

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into those waters of their
world where sullen swans bask,

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adrift in the breakage of
their own reflections."

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