If we could do it.
This second one is Vintage.
I like this one.
I read it to one of my kids and said what do you think?
They said well, it sounds like a Woody Allen movie.
This is my New York City poem.
They had agreed walking into the delicatessen on 6th Avenue
that their friends' affairs were focused and saddened
by massive projection.
Movie screens in their childhood were immense.
And someone had proposed that need was unlovable.
The delicatessen had a chicken salad
with chunks of cooked chicken and half braised vegetables
in a creamy basil mayonnaise, a shade lighter
than the Coast Range in August.
It was gray outside, February.
Eating with plastic forks, walking and talking
in the sleety afternoon, they passed the house
where Djuna Barnes was still reportedly making sentences.
Basho said avoid adjectives of scale.
You will love the world more and desire it less.
And there were other propositions
to consider, childhood, VistaVision,
a pair of wet mobile lips on the screen
at least eight feet long.
On the corner by the liquor store,
a blind man who had lost one leg was selling pencils.
He must have received a disability check,
but it didn't feed his hunger for public agony.
And he sat on the sidewalk with a tin cup,
his face and opaque eyes turned upward
in a look of blind questing pathos.
Half Job, half mole.
Would some good Christ of Manhattan
have restored his sight and 2/3 of his left leg,
or would he have healed his heart
and left him there in a mutilated body?
And what would that peace feel like?
It made you want at this point a quick cut or a reaction shot.
The taxis rivered up Sixth Avenue.
A little sunlight touched the steeple of the First Magyar
Reformed Church.
In fact, the clerk in the liquor store was appalled.
No, no, he said, that cabernet can't be
drunk for another five years.