This is another one from--
written later, but from that New York period.
My friends were right.
I didn't know anybody.
[LAUGHTER]
It took me a while to.
So I roamed the city a great deal.
This is called "Paradise."
In a neighborhood once called Hell's Kitchen,
where the beggar claimed to be playing Nero's fiddle,
while the city burned in midsummer heat, where
a lady barber who called herself Cleopatra wielded
the scissors of fate over my head,
threatening to cut off my ears and nose,
where the man and a woman went walking
naked in one of the dark side streets of dawn.
I must be dreaming, I told myself.
It was like meeting a couple of sphinxes.
I expected them to have wings, bodies of lions,
him with his wildly tattooed chest,
her with her huge dangling breasts.
It happened so quickly and so long ago.
You know that time just before the day
breaks when one yearns to lie down
in cool sheets in a room with shades drawn, the hour when
the beautiful suicides lying side by side in the morgue
get up and walk out into the first light, the curtains
of cheap hotels flying out of windows like seagulls.
But everything else, quiet, steam rising out of the subway
gratings, bodies glistening with sweat, madness,
and you might even say, paradise.