Here's another New York poem, but it
was written in the late 80s.
Describes late 50s, when I first came from Chicago to New York.
At first, when I--
we first lived in New York for a year,
and then we went to Chicago.
And I finished high school there and lived another two years.
And I always wanted to go back to New York by myself.
Because I was a little snob, you know,
I wanted more jazz, more art, more foreign movies,
more bookstores, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I picked up and left.
And despite my friends telling me,
you don't know anybody in New York.
What are you going to do in New York?
And so there was a party for me the night before,
and I remember I had a--
it was an Oxford University Press,
a little book of very delicate paper,
of Dante's Divine Comedy .
And there was a guy there at the party
who said, you have to read that St. Thomas Aquinas,
in order to understand Dante.
So before leaving, actually I was
going to hitchhike to New York.
Well, I'll describe it to you as you'll see in the poem.
But anyway, very quickly, hitchhiking,
I lost Dante and was stuck with St. Thomas Aquinas for--
[LAUGHTER]
--Two months.
So this is the setting of this poem, called St. Thomas
Aquinas.
"I left parts of myself everywhere,
the way absent minded people leave gloves and umbrellas
whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck.
I was on a park bench, asleep.
It was like the art of ancient Egypt.
I didn't wish to disturb myself.
I made my long shadow take the evening train.
We give death to a child, when we give it a doll,
said the woman who had read Djuna Barnes.
We whispered all night.
She had traveled to darkest Africa.
She had many stories to tell about the jungle.
I was already in New York, looking for work.
It was raining as in the days of Noah.
I stood in many doorways in that great city.
Once, I asked a man in tuxedo for a cigarette.
He gave me a frightened look and stepped out into the rain.
Since man naturally desires happiness,
according to St. Thomas Aquinas, who
gave irrefutable proof of God's existence and purpose,
I loaded trucks in the garbage center.
Me and a black man stole a woman's red dress.
It was of silk.
It shimmered.
Upon a gloomy night, with all our loving ardors on fire,
we carried it down the long, empty avenue, each holding one
sleeve.
The heat was intolerable, causing
many terrifying human faces to come out of hiding.
In the public library reading room,
there was a single ceiling fan barely turning.
I had the travels of Herman Melville
to serve me as a pillow.
I was on a ghost ship with its sails fully raised.
I could see no land anywhere.
The sea and its monsters could not call me.
I followed a saintly-looking nurse into a doctor's office.
We rushed past people with eyes and ears bandaged.
I'm a medieval philosopher in exile,
I explained to my landlady that night.
[LAUGHTER]
And truly, I no longer looked like myself.
I wore glasses with a nasty spider crack with over one eye.
I stayed in the movies all day long.
A woman on the screen walked through a bombed city,
again and again.
She wore army boots.
Her legs were long and bare.
It was cold, wherever she was.
She had her back turned to me, but I was in love with her.
I expected to find wartime Europe at the exit.
It wasn't even snowing.
Everyone I met wore a part of my destiny, like a carnival mask.
I'm Bartleby the Scrivener, I told the Italian waiter.
Me too, he replied.
[LAUGHTER]
And I could see nothing but overflowing ashtrays
the human-faced flies were busy examining."